Kevin Crowston

Overview

Kevin Crowston is a Distinguished Professor of Information Science at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies. He received his A.B. (1984) in Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) from Harvard University and a Ph.D. (1991) in Information Technologies from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently serving as Associate Dean for Research.

He is currently seeking Ph.D. students interested in the impact on work design of systems with increased autonomy and capability. Please get in touch by email if you are interested.

Research

Crowston’s research examines new ways of organizing made possible by the use of information technology. He approaches this issue in several ways: empirical studies of coordination-intensive processes in human organizations (especially virtual organization); theoretical characterizations of coordination problems and alternative methods for managing them; and design and empirical evaluation of systems to support people working together. Specific domains of interest include free/libre open source software development projects, citizen science projects and research data management.

He is a co-PI on an NSF INSPIRE project: “INSPIRE: Teaming Citizen Science with Machine Learning to Deepen LIGO’s View of the Cosmos” (15-47880) that has produced the Gravity Spy system. He is the former PI on NSF SOCS Grant 12-11071 for “Collaborative Research: Focusing Attention to Improve the Performance of Citizen Science Systems: Beautiful Images and Perceptive Observers” (see here for details). With colleagues, he will be leading a research coordination network aimed at developing a socio-technical perspective on work in the age of intelligent machines.

Keywords: virtual work; virtual organizations; free/libre/open source software development practices; citizen science; work design for work with autonomous systems

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Professional

Editor in chief for the journal ACM Transactions on Social Computing; co-Editor in chief for the journal Information, Technology and People. Past chair of the International Federation of Information Systems (IFIP) Working Group 8.2 on Information Systems and Organizations and of the Academy of Management Organizational Communications and Information Systems Division.

Teaching

Research methods; systems analysis; cyber-infrastructure.

Personal

reading, travel.