As technologies like AI continue to evolve, and issues around privacy and big data become more prominent, the need to connect researchers and end-users of those technologies has become ever more needed.
That, according to the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business, is why they’ve launched a new speaker series to address the challenges businesses face with new and rapidly changing digital technologies.
The Haskayne Business Exchange (HBX) held its first TEDx-style program on June 13, for Calgary business leaders to learn more about generative AI, smart contracts using blockchain technology, and empowering end-users to control data and their business reputations online.
The idea of holding a series of talks was envisioned by Dr. Sandy Hershcovis, the senior associate dean of research at the Haskayne School of Business.
“We really want this to be something that people can really relate to, delivering research in a different kind of way,” she said.
“The research we do is meant to impact business, but what happens too often is that we do the research, we publish it, and then it doesn’t make it past the pages of our journals to the academic community. We’ve heard that feedback from the business community, and so the purpose of this event is really to listen to that feedback, get out there, have a conversation, and let them hear what we’re doing.”
Dr. Hershcovis said that the University of Calgary has a number of trans-disciplinary research themes and that the digital world is among those areas of interest because of the impact of those technologies on society.
“If you’re working today, you know that generative AI is already changing the way we do work. It’s going to transform business in a major way,” Hershcovis said.
“So, figuring out what that transformation is going to look like, how it’s going to impact our daily work is critical. I think we’re going to see some pretty significant differences in the workplace in the next two to 10 years, and learning how technology impacts and changes the workplace, well, I think just helps people prepare people for what’s to come.”
She said the initial speakers were selected for their deep knowledge of these emerging technologies, and for their gifted speaking abilities.
Although, said Dr. Hershcovis, the school did hire a TEDx speaking coach to help the presenters soften the academic way of speaking and make the talks more relatable to the public in the 15-minute TED Talk format.
Translating mathematics and game theory into digestible information
One of those presenters, Dr. Sule Nur Kutlu, said that coaching was helpful in translating her research topics and a pair of her academic papers into a more digestible format.
“Because what I do in my research is that I mostly do tend to do modelling—which means whatever you see in real life, you turn that into a mathematical formula, and then try to calculate the equilibrium of that society under game theory—that part was something that I enjoy, but I couldn’t touch it on the presentation in detail because it’s not going to make sense for us, and we don’t have that much time,” she said.
“I always try to take the research questions from real-life problems, and I know that the research question is going to make a lot of sense.”
Her talk was on protecting user privacy on online platforms, how government regulations can lead to unintended outcomes for users and privacy, and detecting fake news websites using machine learning.
Those papers are available through the University of Calgary at profiles.ucalgary.ca/sule-nur-kutlu.
“Right now, we try to create some regulation in order to give some control to the users who aren’t the only owner of that data… and there’s still a lot of like arguments and how effective that regulation is. So with mathematical modelling, we try to understand it, and whether really makes sense to have a regulation that way or whether we need something else,” Kutlu said.
She said that her talk garnered a lot of discussion afterward, including about how local businesses design their websites to be GDPR compliant.
“One of the discussions that we had is that even though there’s this regulation, companies are motivated, plus forced to share their third party information. But there’s still some tricks over there,” Kutlu said.
Dr. Kutlu said that one of those tricks is greying out buttons on websites when asked if people want to accept cookies or have their information shared with third parties, which makes it seem like that is actually not an option that can be selected.
“Since we don’t have a higher awareness, online literacy awareness in our society, people tend to click on accept all. So there was the end of that discussion, maybe we should be focusing on how to be more open to our users rather than trying to trick them, even with the regulation that you’re trying to help them,” she said.
She said that translating university research into something that can be used by businesses and the public, is one of the biggest contributions that researchers can make to society.
“At the University of Calgary, we are putting out a lot of effort to create good research questions, and then publish in the top tier journals. But if we cannot transfer it to society, yes, we are adding to the research, but if this is not something sharing to the society then it doesn’t add any value to society,” Kutlu said.
“This is one of the best ways that we can communicate with industry leaders, and also the members of our society. The feedback that we received from them will create a lot of opportunities for us to do our future research.”
Future HBX dates will be announced at haskayne.ucalgary.ca/haskayne-business-exchange.
