Session: Emerging Technologies for Social Work Education and Research: Towards the Development of Scalable Interventions for the 21st Century (Society for Social Work and Research 24th Annual Conference - Reducing Racial and Economic Inequality)

Technology has quickly and radically changed the way individuals, communities, and nations educate their populace, communicate and navigate the world. The proliferation of smartphones, home computers, unprecedented access to artificial intelligence, and the wide low-to-no cost dissemination of programming languages has allowed for the development of software and hardware that has changed the nature of the social world. Recent works illustrate the ways in which social work scholars, educators, and practitioners can harness some of these tools to further social work education (Hitchcock et al., 2019; Goldkind, Wolf, & Freddolino, 2019). Yet, while several mobile apps have been developed for intervention development and implementation, little research has examined the ways in which technology might be harnessed to evolve social work education and research specifically. In particular, artificial intelligence, with its proliferation in most aspects of daily life, has as yet been little explored in the social work research literature This symposium brings together four papers using a mobile chat bot app, virtual reality, advanced machine learning algorithms, and examining potential social service-based tech career pathways to illustrate how advanced technologies may be harnessed to meet a myriad of social work's grand challenges.

The symposium aims to:

1. Showcase the need for social service-based tech career pathways in order to meet the breadth and depth of social work's grand challenges;

2. Illustrate the potential of chat bots, virtual reality simulations, and advanced machine learning algorithms to develop a variety of scalable interventions;

3. Provide audience members with working knowledge of these technologies and potential career pathways;

4. Emphasize how technologies may be harnessed to amplify marginal voices and experiences, thereby producing more inclusive, holistic interventions