HTLab's webinar series comes to a successful end

On Monday, April 11, the project "From Man to Technology. The Humane Technology Lab Dialogues". The initiative was organized by the Humane Technology Lab of Università Cattolica, in media partnership with Rai Scuola, and was divided into a cycle of three webinars. The events were attended by experts from business, academia and public administration, and were moderated by journalists specialising in technology and innovation. The topics discussed, in line with the Laboratory's mission to study the interrelationships between technology and the different dimensions of human experience, attracted and actively involved thousands of students and professionals, demonstrating that the human-centric approach to the analysis of digital technologies plays an increasingly important role in the public and academic debate. The Director of the Laboratory, Professor Giuseppe Riva, attended all the webinars, framing them within the activities of the Humane Technology Lab and actively intervening during the debates.

The series of events was inaugurated by the webinar "What do the Humanities have to do with Technologies?", which was attended by Annachiara Sacchi, journalist of Corriere della Sera, Roberto Villa, President of the IBM Foundation, and Marco Carlo Passarotti, Professor of Linguistics at Università Cattolica, who from September will be the coordinator of the new master's degree course in Computational Linguistics. Roberto Villa, speaking in reference to the figure of the computational linguist, highlighted the crucial nature of the human contamination of technology, arguing that "in the world of work, IBM and other companies will increasingly require profiles of those who will be able to interpret large amounts of data by combining humanistic, digital and technological skills" and that "the need to develop professionals with interdisciplinary skills is due to the fact that each sector of industry will have associated a specific AI system to be able to handle in order to extract knowledge".

Digital technologies are now at the center of every individual's daily life, and Covid-19 has helped to accelerate this process by clearing practices, such as working from home, which were not widespread in the pre-pandemic period. Smart Working was the subject of debate in the second webinar on 30 March, which hosted Stefano Besana, EY Wavespace Leader and author of the book "The Future of Work" and Cristina Tajani, expert adviser at the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. Tajani, urged by Andrea Bettini, a journalist for RaiNews24, focused on collective bargaining as a regulatory tool for teleworking, defining the dialogue between trade unions and company representatives as "a useful exercise to redefine the organizational methods of work performance according to company objectives and the specificities of each sector."

The cycle concluded with an interesting debate on the relationship between creativity and technology, which was attended by Giovanni Emanuele Corazza, president of the Guglielmo Marconi Foundation and Professor of Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Bologna, Andrea Gaggioli, Professor of General Psychology at Università Cattolica, and Chiara Placenti, journalist for Radio inBlu2000. According to Corazza, technology "can certainly help creativity, giving voice to modes of expression that were unthinkable up to 30 years ago" but it can also generate "negative effects on attentional span, which is fundamental for the immersion and incubation time that creativity requires".