A complex system is a system with many interacting parts. Like a biological ecosystem, modern computer systems are embedded in social and computational networks that require new ways of thinking about interaction.
Complex systems designers1, like me, are interdisciplinary, integrating ethnographic and engineering methods to produce socio-technical systems that leverage emergent artificial and human intelligences.
About me
I am an interdisciplinary researcher in complex systems design. My current job is Informatics Curator2, meaning I develop human-AI systems to support biological research into the thousands of physical animal and plant specimens at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. I did my PhD in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Prof. Ivan Beschastnikh. I work with things that are physical, biological, social and computational. Usually, that means I create intelligent computational systems that incorporate humans with our bodies, environments, and data.
To support this, I also teach complex systems science through the lens of robotics in the very interdisciplinary3 Cognitive Systems program. I also have taught software engineering, human-computer interaction and systems design at UBC, BCIT, Corpus Christi, and Douglas College. My first career was in media arts.
Google scholar • ORCID • GitHub • COGS 300 • Working with me • Consulting
- Historically, we might have been called cyberneticists but they got together and renamed the field in 1957. I like the old name, but nobody really knows what it means. ↩︎
- Technically, the full title is Collections Curator for Biodiversity Informatics, but that’s a real mouthful. ↩︎
- Rather than being only about cognitive psychology, UBC’s Cognitive Systems program is a mix between linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science. In other places, it might be called complex systems science. ↩︎