SIOP 2018: Schedule Planning for IO Psychology Technology

Every year, I post some screenshots of my insane schedule for seeing all of the technology-related content at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).  As began in earnest last year, the technology program this year is sizable too.  Yet my schedule is even worse than last year somehow, and after accounting for all of my scheduled meetings and sessions in which I’m presenting, I had a grand total of three conference slots open to attend presentations of my own choosing.  One of them, I chose to sleep!

So, if you’re interested in technology in I-O psychology at SIOP 2018, let me tell you what I’m doing so that you can attend! I’m excited about all of these, and I’m centrally involved in all but two of them. If you come to any, please find me and say hello! I’ll also be active on Twitter as usual.

1. Pre-Conference Workshop: Modern Analytics for Data Big and Small on Wednesday, April 18, both AM and PM workshops.  Dan Putka (HumRRO) and I will be given a practical workshop on modern techniques for data acquisition (web scraping/APIs), processing of unstructured text data (natural language processing), and advanced predictive modeling (supervised machine learning) and their applications to I-O science and practice. I’ve heard we are almost full but believe there are still a few slots available!
2. Technology in Assessment Community of Interest on Thursday, April 19 at 10:00 AM in Mayfair.  Have you been feeling lost lately in regards to tech in assessment in I-O? Does it seem like the research literature is so ancient that it feels like it’s from another era? Do you want to help fix that, and become part of a community of like-minded researchers and practitioners? If so, come to this session! Our goal is to work through some of the biggest issues in a high-level pass at discussion, with the goal of seeding some activities for a longer-term, more permanent virtual community of assessment tech researchers and practitioners! Join us!
3. SIOP Select: I-O Igniting Innovation on Thursday, April 19 at 12:00PM in Sheraton 5. In this invited SIOP session, I’ll be introducing a panel of experts in the area of innovation, particularly including I-Os and non-I-Os that have worked in startups! Come hear how I-O can and do contribute to Silicon Valley.
4. SIOP Select: TeamSIOP Gameshow Battle for the TeamSIOP Theme Track Championship on Thursday, April 19 at 1:30PM in Sheraton 5. I don’t want to spoil the surprise on what this is, but if you want to be on a game show at SIOP, this is your chance!
5. Recruitment in Today’s Workplace Community of Interest on Thursday, April 19 at 4:30PM in Mayfair. In this community of interest, let’s discuss how recruitment has fully entered the digital era and what I-O needs to do to stay on top of the changes afoot.
6. Using Natural Language Processing to Measure Psychological Constructs on Friday, April 20 at 8:00AM in Sheraton 2.  In this symposium chaired by one of my PhD students with me as discussant, hear from several different academic and practitioner teams about how they are using natural language processing, a data science technique for utilizing text data in quantitative analyses.
7. SIOP Select: A SIOP Machine Learning Competition: Learning by Doing on Friday, April 20 at 10:00AM in Chicago 6. Several months ago, nearly 20 teams competed to get the best, most generalizable prediction in a complex turnover dataset. The four winning teams are presenting in this session. In full disclosure, we weren’t one of them! Team TNTLAB was right middle of the pack – yet our R^2 was a full .02 lower than the winning team! We’re definitely going to be attending this one to learn what we’re going to do next year.
8. Where Do We Stand? Alternative Methods of Ranking I-O Graduate Programs on Friday, April 20 at 11:30AM in Gold Coast. In the current issue of TIP, we got a whole bunch of new ranking systems for I-O psychology graduate programs, including one put together by TNTLAB! In this session, you get to learn exactly where these ranking systems came from. I expect some stern words and maybe even some yelling from the audience, so this is definitely one to attend!
9. Employee Selection Systems in 2028: Experts Debate if Our Future “Bot of Not?” on Friday, April 20 at 3:00PM in Chicago 9. In this combination IGNITE and panel discussion, each presenter (including me!) will share their vision of just how much artificial intelligence will have taken over selection processes in organizations by 2028.
10. Technology-Enhanced Assessment: An Expanding Frontier on Friday, April 20 at 4:00PM in Gold Coast. This is my first “optional” session of the conference, but it looks to be a great one! Learn how PSI, Microsoft, ACT and Revelian are innovating in the assessment space. I hope to learn about the newest of the new!
11. Make Assessment Boring Again: Have Game-based Assessments Become Too Much Fun? on Saturday, April 21 at 10:00AM in Huron. In this panel discussion, a group of practitioners and one lone wolf academic (me!) will discuss the current state of game-based assessments and how I-O is (and is not) adapting to them.
12. SIOP Select: New Wine, New Bottles: An Interactive Showcase of I-O Innovations on Saturday, April 21 at 11:30AM in Chicago 6. This session is my brainchild, so I am really hoping it is fantastic! I’ve invited three I-O practitioners that I think represent the height of innovation integrating computer science and I-O psychology to reveal just how they did it. But they can’t just talk the talk – they’ve got to walk the walk. We’ll see live demos in front of the whole room with naive audience members which I will select live from the audience. No plants, I’m keeping them honest! But that means the tech has got to be perfect! Check it out!
13. Forging the Future of Work with I-O Psychology on Saturday, April 21 at 1:30PM in Superior A. In this session, learn about the results from the SIOP Futures Task Force (which I was on and am leading next year!) exploring how I-O psychology and SIOP need to adapt to survive in this increasingly constantly changing world of work.
14. IGNITE + Panel: Computational Models for Organizational Science and Practice on Saturday, April 21 at 3:00PM in Sheraton 5. This is my second optional session, and I’m going mostly because I want to know what an IGNITE session about computational models will look like! This is a crazy idea even on the face of it! But Jay Goodwin (USARI) and Jeff Vancouver are on it, so I know it’s going to be amazing!

I hope to see you there! Safe travels to all!