Kevin Crowston

Kevin Crowston is a Distinguished Professor of Information Science at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies (aka the iSchool). 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.

Crowston is currently on a temporary rotation as a Program Director at the US National Science Foundation for the Human-Centred Computing Program in the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.

His 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. For more information, please consult his vitae and now quite out-of-date Fall 2005 research statement (both in PDF). Specific domains of interest include free/libre open source software development projects and citizen science projects.

He was until recently a PI on 3 NSF sponsored projects: NSF SOCS Grant 09-68470 for "SOCS: Socially intelligent computing to support citizen science" (see here for details); NSF SOCS Grant 11-11107 for "SOCS: Socially intelligent computing for coding of qualitative data" (see here for details); and 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). For information on previous projects, please see his web site.

Kevin Crowston was a founding member of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and the University of Michigan Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Auckland, Department of Management Science and Information Systems, a researcher at the Centre for Technology and Innovation Management at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, a Shidler Visiting Fellow at the University of Hawai'i Shidler College of Business and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Work, Technology and Organizations, Stanford University.

Professor Crowston is the Vice-Chair and Webmaster for IFIP Working Group 8.2.