Keynote Speakers for ICBER 2018

Prof. Basu D. Sharma
University of New Brunswick, Canada

Basu D. Sharma, Professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of New Brunswick in Canada since 1985, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in U.S.A. He has held appointments at the National University of Singapore, Tribhuvan University (Kathmandu, Nepal), and University of Saskatchewan. He has been a consultant for the International Labour Organization, the Singapore National Employers Federation, and the Singapore Institute of Labour. He has held the position of president of the Atlantic Schools of Business Society thrice-in 2005, 2006 and 2016. He has served the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada, the flagship association of the profession, at different times in different capacities such as member of the Executive, Awards Chair, division Chair for Management Education division, and for International Business division as recently as 2018. Dr. Sharma is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Comparative International Management. And he has been or was on the editorial boards of many academic journals including: the Journal of Management, the International Journal of Management Literature, Labour and Management in Development, Research and Practice in Human Resource Management, Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Workplace Review, and Transnational Corporations Review. Professor Sharma's wide-ranging research interests include: human development, foreign capital resources and developing countries, comparative-international employment relations; executive compensation in international context; and cross-cultural negotiation. He has published papers in a variety of academic journals such as Applied Economics, ASEAN Economic Bulletin , Asian Economies, Asian Pacific Journal of Human Resource Management, Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Economics Letter, Euro-Asia Business Review, Industrielle Beziehungen, Industrial Relations, Journal of Labour Research, Journal of Asian Business, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Total Quality Management Journal. He has contributed chapters to more than a dozen edited volumes. He is the author of Aspects of Industrial Relations in ASEAN-also translated into Japanese by Professor Kagawa and published in Japan by Doshisha University in Tokyo.

Speech Title: Work and Employment Relations in the Platform Economy
Abstract: The new digitally transforming economy goes by various names, depending upon one’s assessment of its potential to create economic and social benefits. It is the creative economy, or the sharing economy for optimists; for pessimists, it is the gig economy or the precariat or the 1099 economy. And for neutral observers, it is the platform economy (Kenney and Zysman, 2016). Whatever way it is branded, the new economy has begun to influence and challenge old modalities of organizing economic activities and relations in a profound way. And companies such as Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit--to name a few--are at the forefront of this revolution. The new technology has created online marketplaces for labour where an open bidding is made possible with the marriage of an algorithm revolution and cloud computing. Applications have been developed to broker the labor markets in the platforms of respective employers. Workers are rebranded as freelancers, contractors, temps, taskers, and project workers. In fact, the spectrum of the changing landscape covers the gamut from proletariats to pricariates (Standing, 2013). These developments have presented to workers and employers with new prospects as well as problems in their relationships. The objective of this paper is to delineate these emerging phenomena with a view to deriving some policy recommendations such that the transition becomes painless for all parties concerned.

Prof. Tim Huh
University of British Columbia, Canada
Tim Huh is expert in operations management, supply chain management and dynamic pricing. He has worked with companies in the semiconductor industry, health care organizations, insurance companies, and manufacturing facilities both in Canada and the United States. In particular, his work with semiconductor companies was on capacity expansion and configuration when both the production technology and demand for products are subject to high uncertainty. He has conducted workshops on operational effectiveness for various audiences. He is in several editorial boards for leading journals in operations management. He received PhD from Cornell University. He received multiple teaching awards.

Speech Title: Data Analytics: Methodology and Issues
Abstract: Data analytics is increasingly becoming an important part of decision making process in applications ranging from management, technology, policy analysis and sports. Key decisions that have been traditionally made by humans are now partly made or at least recommended by analytics platforms. We will discuss different types of analytics, and how they have emerged from and are related to traditional academic disciplines. Several examples will be discussed. We will also address social issues associated with the use of analytics such as privacy and technological determinism.