KRISTO IVANOV
AT THE DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATICS, UMEÅ
UNIVERSITY
Visiting campus-address: MIT-Huset, office E426
With a short curriculum vitae and statement of research interests
(Version 220221)
https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/Bio.html (with all links live)
https://ia902301.us.archive.org/26/items/index_20180203/Bio.html
KRISTO IVANOV,
born 1937 in Belgrade from Bulgarian parents, was educated in Italy, Brazil,
France, and Sweden. He is DrTechn/PhD from Stockholm
University and Royal Institute of Technology KTH, full professor since 1984,
and has degrees in electronic engineering, psychology, and computer
science/administrative data processing (informatics) with minors in industrial
economics, statistics, and political economy. During the sixties and the seventies he worked as an engineer in France, Sweden and the
USA, and in managerial positions in the computer industry.
His dissertation in 1972 at the Royal Institute of Technology &
Stockholm university concerning Quality-Control
of Information was an early application of the Design of Inquiring Systems
(book-index on knowledge management, also in PDF-format)
launched by C. West
Churchman at the University of California-Berkeley [details at (1), (2) and (3)]. It
had broad implications for design of databases, ERP-MIS (Enterprise Resource
Planning and Management Information Systems), and regulatory systems for
auditing including the setting of audit standards. Subsequently he taught and
pursued research at the department of Statistics of Stockholm University and at
the departments of Mathematics and of Computer and Information Science of
Linköping university. In the latter position he was also responsible for the
program of social informatics and system analysis.
Since 1984 he was full professor at the Department of
Informatics of Umeå University, and was
head and chairman of the board of the department between 1986 and 1998. This took
place within a historically crucial longer period of development of the
discipline, portrayed in a draft version (in Swedish) of the local history
of informatics. Cooperation with Berkeley's systems approach was
consolidated by his nomination of prof. Churchman for a degree honoris causa
awarded by the university in 1985 and by hosting him at the department during
his sabbatical in 1987. Ivanov has been adjunct faculty, and member of
scientific boards both in Sweden and abroad. He has worked as consultant and
expert to a number of government institutions, and private industry. Between
1991 and 2004 he was scientific advisor to the National Board of Health and
Welfare (Socialstyrelsen). In 1997 he was elected
"president elect" of ISSS, the
International Society for the Systems Sciences, a position which he later had
to relinquish because of other demanding duties. He is professor emeritus since October
2002.
Ivanov's later research interests as represented by more than 100 main
publications are focused on the relation between systems science and its
applications to business and government. He is especially interested in the
interplay among technical, economic, political, psychological, aesthetical and
ethical considerations in the design and use of information technology,
including philosophical and theological issues that lately have also been
labeled as existential or phenomenological issues of culture and spirituality.
One main question that dominates the research interest is what directs and
should direct the development and application of information technology.
SOME ADDITIONAL DETAILS
For a more "marketable" description of interests, it can be
stated that a main research theme is the basis for learning and organization of
knowledge and skills at different levels in organizations, at the individual,
group and organizational levels. A second theme is the basis for development,
implementation and utilization of information and communication technologies in
organizations with the aim of implementing the legitimately expected benefits
for the different stakeholders, including all affected people.
This includes concerns for "methods in action", formerly known
as issues of implementation. To trendy bywords like change, flexibility,
creativity, innovation, interaction and learning Ivanov likes to contrast
questions like "Change caused or imposed by whom or by what?",
"Change of what, to what, and what for?", "Is flexibility as
adaptation to change always good or can its perceived necessity be caused by
lack of knowledge or courage?", "Is interaction, creativity or
innovation always good or is there a good and a bad action or
creativity?", and "Is learning by itself always good, or how to
foster the learning of good things?". To trendy bywords like virtual
reality or design are opposed questions like "What is real reality in the
first place?" and "Why is the English word design, rooted in the
Latin language, seldom seen as translatable into other European
languages?". And why some researchers do see these words as balderdash?
Those who are interested in fundamental and philosophical matters of
scientific method may appreciate that Ivanov's position evolved out of C.
West Churchman's later work originating somehow between Charles Sanders Peirce's
and William James' (as contrasted to John Dewey's) American philosophical
pragmatism, and European continental philosophy including phenomenology at its
sources, prior to its later secularization. This implies attempts to build
partly upon Kantian and less known post-Kantian insights and their criticism or
"meta-critique" by original historical personalities.
Examples of such personalities are, chronologically, Franz von Baader (see also an alternative encyclopedic source on Baader), Johann Georg
Hamann, Max
Scheler, Antonio Rosmini (see also an alternative source on Rosmini), Bernard Lonergan,
and, in humanistic psychological studies, Carl Gustav Jung. A Swedish
source of inspiration has been a controversial or, rather, "politically
incorrect" political scientist and historian, Tage Lindbom, whose import is considered in some dept in the essay
of year 1993 on Belief and Reason. The
practical interest of such positionings is the striving for an integration
between cognitive and emotional aspects (Kantian realms of reason,
understanding, and judgment), or, rather, between so called rational and
ethical-theological aspects of design and use of information technology as
recently exemplified in the cultural dialogue between the social philosopher Jürgen
Habermas and the theologian, later pope, Joseph
Ratzinger in The
Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion
(2007).This should also qualify the approach to presently fashionable issues of
design, multimedia including experiential bodily interaction, multi-culturalism
and gender beyond feminism, as expressed, for instance, in Baader's
treatment of the role of imagination, catholicism,
and erotic philosophy. Design must be seen also as a theological question as
suggested in the concluding pages of a dissertation by Gunnela Ivanov. Ultimately it is a question of
exploring the implications of the academic core of the Encyclical Letters on The
Splendor of Truth, and Faith
and Reason, as considered in Ivanov's Dialectical Systems Design and Beyond.
And, finally, more humoristically: you may
want to know why this home page is not designed in a fancier way, or why it
does not display a greater number of activities equated to achievements, or
"projects" characterized by an apparently unending succession of
deadly deadlines in what has been called a "death culture". If you do
not care about or do not agree with the view of time-effectiveness in the Bible
(Ecclesiasticus/Ben Sira 38:24), in Plato (Theaetetus 172d), or in Aristotle
(Politics 1272 a32-b7, 1337 b23-1338 b8), you are invited to look for
inspiration in more popular books like Tyranny of the
moment: Fast and slow time in the information age [Swedish
translation from the Norwegian original: Ögonblickets
tyranni] or, for Swedish readers, Långsamhetens lov [In praise of slowness]! You will find more on this
matter of time in the link to "Research".
Long after I wrote this text (above) Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber published their book The
slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy (2016) as
appreciated by Werner Ulrich in his reflections Toward a
"Knowledge democracy"(March-May 2018).