ISHANDS-SEM-M: Digital Transformation: Presence and Future with AI and IT

Overview and Objective

The Chair of Information Systems, Health and Society in the Digital Age offers a combined Bachelor’s and Master’s seminar. This semester’s topic focuses on digital transformation and its influence on individuals, organizations, and society.

Topics

The accelerating convergence of AI, digital platforms, automation, and data-centric innovation is reshaping how we live, work, and interact. This seminar examines how emerging technologies can be deployed to create meaningful progress while also managing key socio-technical tensions around trust, privacy, well-being, and the future of work.

Digital transformation refers to the ongoing, often disruptive reconfiguration of products, services, processes, and entire industries through the pervasive use of digital technologies. It goes beyond digitizing existing work: it changes how value is created and captured, how decisions are made, and how organizations coordinate and innovate. As AI becomes embedded in everyday tools and infrastructures, transformation increasingly unfolds as a socio-technical process. It is shaped not only by technical feasibility, but also by human adoption and skills, organizational governance and accountability, and societal expectations around trust, privacy, fairness, and sustainability.

The seminar is structured around the following four thematic areas:

1. Foundations of Digital Transformation (especially suitable for Bachelor students): Core concepts and mechanisms of digital transformation; how AI, platforms, and emerging technologies reshape products, services, and ecosystems across levels.
2. Private Life: How people adopt, use, or resist AI and digital technologies in everyday routines and decisions, e.g., the effects of AI and IT services on health, communication, and personal relationships.
3. Work and Education: How individuals experience and use AI and IT in work, training, and higher education, e.g., acceptance and reliance on AI tools, productivity and learning outcomes, skill development, well-being, and fairness perceptions.
4. Societal and Ethical Dimensions: Societal impacts of AI and platforms, e.g., privacy, fairness, transparency, accountability, cybersecurity, and effects on social interaction.

Timeline of the seminar

• The initial meeting with all seminar participants will be on Friday, April 17^th (10 am)
• The deadline for the seminar paper will be on Sunday, June 28^th (11:55 pm)
• The presentations will be held in person as part of a block seminar starting on Friday, July 10^th
• Seminar papers and presentations are to be submitted digitally via upload in the Virtual Campus (VC)

Evaluation of the seminar

• 66.6 percent on the written exam (seminar paper)
• 33.3 percent on the vocal exam (presentation and discussion)
• Note: Students need to pass each the written (seminar paper) and the vocal exam (presentation and discussion) with at least a sufficient grade (“ausreichend”) to pass the seminar §9 (10) (APO der Fakultät Wirtschaftsinformatik und Angewandte Informatik)

Application for the seminar

• Application deadline is Monday, April 13^th (10:00 am)
• Please apply by completing the form below and indicate your preferred topics
• You will receive an email between Monday, April 13^th, and Thursday, April 16^th, telling you whether your application was successful.
• Note: please check your email regularly – if we do not receive an acceptance email from you, we will allow other students to participate in the seminar.
• If you want to join another seminar, please contact Florian Wintmölle (florian. wintmölle@uni-bamberg.de) and disclose your decision so other students can participate.
• In exceptional cases (e.g., if spots become available due to dropouts), late applications may be considered.

Further requirements of the seminar:

• While we want to motivate students to submit the seminar paper and/or present their results in English, there is the possibility to submit and/or present in German
• The length of the seminar paper follows international guidelines.
• The presentation should be between 15 and 20 minutes.