FW-HTF-P: Office Work in the AI Age

办公室工作是美国各部门工作场所的重要组成部分，涉及数千万工人。此外，做办公室工作不仅仅是处理文书和信息；它还包括组织知识、沟通和关系建立以及其他人际交往技巧。这些工作依赖和工作复杂性的双重问题引起了人们对基于人工智能的办公自动化工具的设计的关注，这些工具使用软件代理、机器学习和数据分析。许多这样的工具在设计时没有考虑到员工的需求或组织的复杂性；这里的错误会导致工人的生活质量下降和失业，对公司和客户的影响更糟。该规划项目将制定一个多学科的研究议程，对办公室工作和影响它的自动化设计进行仔细的科学研究，目标是改善办公室自动化和员工的培训和成果。该项目包括三个主要活动。第一个是综合文献综述，结合批判性综述方法、系统化综述框架和对最先进的办公自动化系统的综述。第二项研究涉及对一系列焦点小组进行定性分析，这些小组对办公室工作人员的日常工作实践和挑战、他们的专业发展和培训，以及他们对未来工作和办公室自动化的看法进行了广泛的调查。第三项主要活动是为期三天的创意研讨会，将以前两项活动的成果为基础。该研究团队将召集多学科的学术和行业专家，他们来自人的因素、计算机科学和人工智能、经济学、劳动和人力资源管理、公共政策、公平和多样性，以确定办公室工作领域和研究主题，这些领域和主题对未来的研究来说是最有趣、最有前途和最有影响力的。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Office work is an important part of the American workplace across sectors, involving tens of millions of workers. Further, doing office work is not just about the processing of paperwork and information; it also involves organizational knowledge, communication and relationship building, and other interpersonal skills. These twin issues of job reliance and job complexity raise concerns for the design of artificial intelligence-based office automation tools that use software agents, machine learning, and data analytics. Many such tools are designed without workers' needs or organizational complexity in mind; mistakes here can lead to reduced quality of life and job loss for workers, and worse outcomes for firms and customers. This planning project will develop a multi-disciplinary research agenda toward the careful scientific study of both office work and the design of automation that affects it, with the goal of improving both office automation and training and outcomes for workers.The project involves three main activities. The first is a comprehensive literature review using a combination of the critical review method, the systematized review framework, and a review of state-of-the-art office automation systems. The second involves qualitative analysis of a series of focus groups conducted with a broad sample of office workers about their daily work practices and challenges, their professional development and training, and their perceptions about the future of their job and of office automation. The third main activity is a three-day ideation workshop that will build on the findings from the first two activities. The research team will convene multidisciplinary academic and industry experts from human factors, computer science and artificial intelligence, economics, labor and human resource management, public policy, and equity and diversity to identify domains of office work and research themes that look most interesting, promising, and impactful for future research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.