In the last week of September, the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Directorate (SBE) at the National Science Foundation announced the repositioning of some of its basic research programs.

The repositioning is intended to allow the SBE to better meet several objectives including responding to new areas of scientific inquiry; communicating the value of basic scientific research; and connecting basic research plans to national priorities.

Richard Landers issued a challenge to I-O psychologists to step out of their workplace silos during his #SmarterWorkplace interview with Colin Omori on AI and Machine Learning.

He said, “’there is this unique, interesting stuff coming out of these new, modern prediction methods, and we need to figure out how to make that our own.’ If we don’t do that, then the data science/computer science communities will do it instead; they’re not going to have our values, and they’re going to run away with the farm, so to speak.”

The CARMA Webcast Lecture Series was established in 2004 and continues as an annual event consisting of 10 live webcast lectures presented by nationally recognized methodologists. Dr. Paul Bliese led off this season’s events with a September 6 talk on panel data.

The nominations deadline for open positions on SIOP’s Executive Board is quickly approaching. Voting members must make nominations by midnight EDT on September 30.

As voting members recognized in the June 2019 Bylaws amendment ballot, diversity of representation is important for strong, effective leadership. The electoral process begins with nominations, and it’s truly important to have different viewpoints and diverse participants involved.

Richard N. Landers answers a few questions about the impact of AI and machine learning on I-O psychology in support of SIOP’s Smarter Workplace Awareness Month.

Dr. Landers is an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and holds the John P. Campbell Distinguished Professorship of Industrial-Organizational Psychology. His research concerns the use of innovative technologies in psychometric assessment, employee selection, adult learning, and research methods, with a recent focus on game-based assessment, gamification, artificial intelligence, unproctored and mobile Internet-based testing, virtual reality, and social media. His work has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Computers in Human Behavior, and Psychological Methods, among others, and his work has been featured in popular outlets such as Forbes, Business Insider, and Popular Science.