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Christoph Becker
I am Full Professor at the Faculty of Information and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto, and Director of the Digital Curation Institute.
I am committed to a transdisciplinary program of research that helps enact meaningful and lasting change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and social justice, at a time when the world is grappling with unprecedented ecological, political and societal crises. The integration of sustainability and social justice in technology, or just sustainability design, remains a ‘grand challenge’ for computing. I tackle it through: (1) the critical examination of the politics, values, and cognitive processes of technology design and (2) the development of methods and tools for just sustainability design in computing, with broader implications on other technologies and contexts. Concrete design projects in urban contexts provide the empirical context to translate the emerging knowledge to practice in collaborative approaches to bring forth just sustainabilities through technology design work.
My research and vision have been supported with $2.6 million in funds from diverse agencies in Canada and Europe (natural science/engineering, social science, and health) and recognized by an equally diverse range of committees, with prestigious awards across computer science, information science, and other social sciences and humanities domains.
My reflections and research on the state and future of computing in relation to society are summarized in my monograph Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability (MIT Press, June 2023, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/insolvent). The monograph has been endorsed by leading scholars in computer science and in philosophy and labelled “compulsory reading for engineers, designers, and everyone interested in thinking about technology”.
It is available directly Open Access at https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/insolvent
Address: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
I am committed to a transdisciplinary program of research that helps enact meaningful and lasting change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and social justice, at a time when the world is grappling with unprecedented ecological, political and societal crises. The integration of sustainability and social justice in technology, or just sustainability design, remains a ‘grand challenge’ for computing. I tackle it through: (1) the critical examination of the politics, values, and cognitive processes of technology design and (2) the development of methods and tools for just sustainability design in computing, with broader implications on other technologies and contexts. Concrete design projects in urban contexts provide the empirical context to translate the emerging knowledge to practice in collaborative approaches to bring forth just sustainabilities through technology design work.
My research and vision have been supported with $2.6 million in funds from diverse agencies in Canada and Europe (natural science/engineering, social science, and health) and recognized by an equally diverse range of committees, with prestigious awards across computer science, information science, and other social sciences and humanities domains.
My reflections and research on the state and future of computing in relation to society are summarized in my monograph Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability (MIT Press, June 2023, https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/insolvent). The monograph has been endorsed by leading scholars in computer science and in philosophy and labelled “compulsory reading for engineers, designers, and everyone interested in thinking about technology”.
It is available directly Open Access at https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/insolvent
Address: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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and other stakeholders engage in decision making that involves
uncertain future outcomes. The concept of ‘intertemporal choice’
describes choices between outcomes at different times in the
future. Short-sighted decisions with far-reaching effects are a
long-standing cause of concern in the software profession.
Common models to support decisions in software projects use
concepts such as expected utility and discount factors to quantify
future value and enable trade-off decisions. However, a growing
body of behavioral research shows that these normative models
do not adequately describe how people actually make choices.
Our objective is to understand how developers and stakeholders
actually take trade-off decisions during software projects that
involve current and future benefits, and to identify the human and
cooperative factors that influence them. This requires empirical
research on decision making in SE with a focus on trade-offs
across time. To support such research, this paper reports on
a systematic literature review that aimed to identify whether
the intersection of these concepts has been acknowledged and
addressed. We discuss the assumptions about decision makers
that underpin existing research and analyze how the role of time
has been characterized in the study of decision making in SE.
Based on this review, the paper begins to develop principles for
a descriptive framework to characterize intertemporal choices in
empirical and behavioral software engineering research.
and other stakeholders engage in decision making that involves
uncertain future outcomes. The concept of ‘intertemporal choice’
describes choices between outcomes at different times in the
future. Short-sighted decisions with far-reaching effects are a
long-standing cause of concern in the software profession.
Common models to support decisions in software projects use
concepts such as expected utility and discount factors to quantify
future value and enable trade-off decisions. However, a growing
body of behavioral research shows that these normative models
do not adequately describe how people actually make choices.
Our objective is to understand how developers and stakeholders
actually take trade-off decisions during software projects that
involve current and future benefits, and to identify the human and
cooperative factors that influence them. This requires empirical
research on decision making in SE with a focus on trade-offs
across time. To support such research, this paper reports on
a systematic literature review that aimed to identify whether
the intersection of these concepts has been acknowledged and
addressed. We discuss the assumptions about decision makers
that underpin existing research and analyze how the role of time
has been characterized in the study of decision making in SE.
Based on this review, the paper begins to develop principles for
a descriptive framework to characterize intertemporal choices in
empirical and behavioral software engineering research.