Susan St. Ledger, the President of Worldwide Field Operations at Splunk Inc. joined the Kenan Institute for a Dean's Speaker Series talk at the Kenan Center on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019. Splunk Inc. is a multinational corporation based in San Francisco, California, that produces software for searching, monitoring and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. Prior to Splunk, Ms. St. Ledger held high-level positions with Salesforce and Sun Microsystems.
On Sept. 9-11, 2019, the Kenan Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for African-American Research will co-host the second Black Communities Conference, an international gathering of scholars and community leaders from across the African diaspora. The conference's core mission is to connect academics from a variety of disciplines with black communities, with the goal of enhancing the life of those communities. Hear more from Kenan Institute Managing Director and conference co-chair Mark Little.
North Carolina’s Research Triangle is booming, driving strong job creation and population growth. Yet the region’s affordable housing stock is shrinking. In November 2019, the Leonard W. Wood Center for Real Estate Studies and our Kenan Scholars Program co-hosted "Investing in Affordable Housing Symposium: Private Market Solutions to the Triangle’s Affordable Housing Shortage." The symposium focused on the private market production and preservation of affordable housing to ensure workers can live and invest in the communities where they work. The event brought together the region’s top developers, financiers, government officials and nonprofit professionals to be part of the conversation on developing new and sustainable solutions to address the Triangle’s affordable housing shortage.
Experts from the 2019 Closing the Wealth Gap Conference at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School discuss the repercussions of the wealth gap not being addressed.
On Sept. 5, our affiliated Center for Sustainable Enterprise awarded Firsthand Foods the 2019 UNC Sustainability Award. Founders Jennifer Curtis and Tina Prevatte Levy met at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and developed the concept of connecting farmers to market. The UNC Sustainability Award recognizes leadership and best practice of a North Carolina business demonstrating initiative, innovation and impact in sustainability.
In March 2019, the UNC Energy Center hosted the New Technologies & Economics for Carbon Capture/Sequestration Conference at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. The conference brought together a highly select group of energy executives and professionals which focused their discussion on the potential for early commercialization of these technologies.
Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies have the potential to significantly disrupt labor markets. While AI and automation can augment the productivity of some workers, they can replace the work done by others and will likely transform almost all occupations at least to some degree. Rising automation is happening in a period of growing economic inequality, raising fears of mass technological unemployment and a renewed call for policy efforts to address the consequences of technological change. In this paper we discuss the barriers that inhibit scientists from measuring the effects of AI and automation on the future of work.