Alan Shark

Executive Director, Public Technology Institute

AI – The Human Machine Partnership (What Could Possibly go Wrong?!)

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Artificial intelligence is already changing how we think, analyze, gather information, and communicate. What are the implications of this new and growing partnership with machines? To what extent will machines take over our jobs? What skills do we and our employees need to know and be aware of? What do know about the art of the prompt? Finally, what might the 7th generation of generative AI look like?

Dr. Alan R. Shark focus has been technology leadership, governance, civic engagement, and emerging technologies in the public sector with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and the public sector. He has taught Technology & Public Administration for over 15 years starting at Rutgers SPAA and currently is associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University. He serves as an affiliate faculty member for GMU’s Center for the Advancement of Human Machine Partnership. In addition to his teaching and research responsibilities, he has served as executive director of the Public Technology Institute (PTI) since 2004. He is co-chair of the Standing Panel on Technology Leadership for NAPA and serves on the executive committee for ASPA’s Science & Technology Interest Group. He frequently writes about technology and government and has over 10 books that he has either written or edited including the textbook, second edition Technology & Public Management and is the host of the bi-monthly podcast on public technology leadership, Sharkbytes.Net.

Neil Kleiman

Professor of Practice & Senior Fellows, Burnes Center for Social Change, Northeastern University

Everything You Need About AI but Were Afraid to Ask

This session will provide practical guidance about embracing AI within local government. We will address concerns about this new technology, detail how to use it for positive results, describe use cases from other locales and provide a framework for developing an AI plan that works best for your culture and operational structure. We will pay particular attention to the role of partnerships (e.g. local universities, philanthropies and technology firms).

Neil Kleiman has spent nearly 30 years building a career at the intersection of policy, philanthropy, government and academia. He founded an urban issues think tank, established new university degree programs, and developed innovative and practical policy solutions for dozens of cities across the United States. He has also written and edited over thirty policy reports, with his work featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and on National Public Radio.

Kleiman is an urban policy professor at Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy and is a senior fellow at the Burnes Center for Social Change. He teaches courses on policy formation, urban innovation, and new approaches to managing technology and big data. In 2017, he published A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative and Distributed Governance on Brookings Institution press. He is the research director of the Mayors Leadership Institute on Smart Cities a partnership effort with the U.S. Conference of Mayors. With partners at the NYU School of Medicine he helped build the www.cityhealthdashboard.com; one of the only consistently updated dashboards tracking local level health and public health data for over 900 cities nationwide. And in 2022, he published one of the first ever assessments of public sector organizational culture in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Kennedy School at Harvard. At Tulane University, Kleiman developed a new John Lewis Master of Public Administration program that launched in 2020.

Kleiman was previously Director of Policy at Living Cities, a collaborative of the world’s largest foundations and corporate philanthropies. He began his career as the founding director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-based policy think tank.