Kristo Ivanov

Kristo Ivanov (born in 1937) is a Swedish-Brazilian information scientist and systems scientist of ethnic Bulgarian origin. He is professor emeritus at the Department of informatics of Umeå University in Sweden.[1]

Contents

Biography

He was born in 1937 in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, grew up and was educated in Italy and Brazil. In 1961 he moved to Sweden where he worked as electronic engineer in the telecommunications and computer industries, with assignments in France and the USA. In 1972 he obtained a Ph.D. degree in informatics at the Department of computer and systems sciences of the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University. Further studies in political economy, business administration, statistics, and a degree in psychology at Lund University[1]

His study led to positions at Stockholm University and Linköping University. In 1984 he was appointed to a chair as full professor of informatics at Umeå University. He is professor emeritus since 2002.[1]

From 1991 to 2004 he was scientific advisor to the National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen). In 1997 he was "president elect" of ISSS, the International Society for the Systems Sciences, a position which he later had to relinquish because of other demanding duties.[1]

Work

In his research and teaching Ivanov focused initially on the application of systems theory to information systems and especially on practical problems of quality-control of information in industrial data bases.

It is the issue of accuracy and precision of data bases as they are related to system development and maintenance, where the systems approach in done in terms of socially framed technical systems, conceived as a further development of the "Berkeley school" in the tradition of professor C. West Churchman.[2]

The following are some notable ideas in Ivanov's work which eventually lead to ethical and theological organizational issues with consequences for practical applications. In order to clarify these ideas they will be illustrated with references to Ivanov's own work and to literature upon which it relies.

Quality-control of information

This was the subject of the doctoral dissertation.[3] It resulted in widened definitions of information accuracy and precision[4] that are grounded in the philosophy of science, especially theory of measurement or metrology,[5] and its elusive but extremely important concept of error,[6] in order to make them applicable in technical systems which are framed in a social context. Quality of data is then seen as the degree of agreement between judgments of data obtained after periodical monitored negotiations in the context of maximum possible disagreement. For this purpose the definition of data itself, i.e. data elements and data structures in a systems context, was widened to conceive data as information and knowledge.[7]

This part of Ivanov's work parallels, and can be seen as a theoretical contribution to the wisdom of crowds and the Wiki-idea itself,[8] It required, however, some reservations for problems of social psychology as implied by the study of popular mind.[9] Its conclusions appear to be relevant also for general data quality, information quality, accuracy and precision, and control of control, the theoretical framework for democratic security and auditing of audit whose importance become obvious in times of financial and political crisis when systemic concepts of effectiveness and progress are put into question.[10] In particular, the concept of quality-control of information contributed to the theoretical base of the so called Scandinavian school of participatory design by anchoring the politically and ideologically motivated action research which flourished in the seventies to a secure scientific conception of information and systems.[11]

This early work was supposed to be completed with a comprehensive research program on the essence of computers seen as a capital-intensive industrial embodiment of the formal sciences of logic, mathematics, and geometry. The purpose was to grasp the why and the whither of the formalization of society which is hidden under an aestheticist mask of audiovisual and tactile graphical interfaces and smart human-computer interaction. One main question was whether you should care about what is presupposed and what happens when you press the button, the keyboard's tangent, or touch the screen, while innocently assuming that you are just communicating or interacting.[12] Or is it a matter of naively understood trust?[13] The research program could not be realized except for the production and survey of an extensive bibliography which was made available to the research community.[14]

Hypersystems

This was a further development of the concept of social systems of the Berkeley school mentioned above, with the intent to prevent that its applications in systems design be reductively transformed into other approaches such as communicative action in the Kantian tradition, participatory design or co-design in the liberal tradition, conflict in the Marxian tradition or, lately, phenomenological and post-phenomenological postmodernism (and perspectivism, as in postmodern philosophy), social networks, actor-network theory (and its "non-modernism"), and design aestheticism.[15]

Together with data quality, hypersystems aimed at offering a theoretical basis for understanding participation and "users" in systems development or maintenance.[16] Hypersystems were intended to be developed into a computerizable structuring tool to foster reflexivity, empathy and negotiation among designers and various problematic types of users who do not see themselves and others primarily as citizens, and are not always able to engage in a supposedly democratic, rational argumentation. Common examples are often found in realistic and emotionally loaded economic, political, and military environments. An extreme example is the attitude "I don't argue, I shoot",[17] and so called madness or its milder but most treacherous and common forms such as borderline personality disorder, which is a legitimate province of psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. In this respect the research efforts tend in the direction of psychology including social psychology, reminding that, along with the philosophy of science, it evolved out of philosophy. These problems are known to lead to issues which are exceedingly complex and unsolvable for those who insist in working, for instance, in a Kantian and Habermasian tradition of pure and practical reason eschewing, however, their controversial integration with aesthetics (Kant's famous third critique, of judgement), and affectivity.[18]

Security

Data quality together with hypersystems led further to a new view of problematic issues of administrative and statistical information systems as also observed by other systems scientists, and statisticians.[19] Measures for security and protection of privacy, apparently based on liberal bureaucracy for authorization into a trusted system, lead to an escalation of protection measures and attack countermeasures, and ultimately to violence or, again, to "I don't argue, I shoot". The principles of hypersystems satisfy the need for a reconciling democratic negotiation and disarmament as monitored by an openly accounted degree of legitimate disagreement or tolerance of error: the heart of diplomacy in "agree to disagree". Ivanov exposes the problem of political power as related to privacy or personal integrity, freedom of speech, rule of law, and ethics, where the clash between privacy and security, supposedly mediated by participatory practices, portrays in terms of political science a fruitless and hopeless clash between socialist and liberal ideologies which lack a "vertical" spiritual dimension.[20] All this is a revival of the research concerns in the early seventies for the impact of Information technology on privacy, democracy, and ultimately on human rights, concerns which seem to have been obliterated by technological innovations such as personal computers and Internet, by the September 11 attacks, by the USA PATRIOT Act and related responses in other countries.[21] There seems to be, however, a symptomatic shortage of computer-oriented research publications in this area since the end of the eighties, while there is some surveillance of the political arena by nongovernmental organizations.[22] Through the concept of justice and its problematization in philosophy of law, and in the context of not only privacy and integrity but, for instance, also restorative justice and forgiveness it is possible to perceive why Ivanov's work bridges over to theology and religion.

Cultural criticism

In later years the emphasis switched to the furthering of systems thinking in face of perceived cultural decline of society, with emphasis on universities and research. This is cultural criticism of inadequate uses of the system concept as well as criticism of some modern and postmodern trends in research and development of computer applications, under labels such as critical theory, phenomenology, design, or sheer eclectic ad-hoc theoretical frameworks. Ivanov perceives that they are often misused to downplay not only economic and political realities but also, and mainly, ethical concerns. His criticism follows from his summarizing statement about the future of the systems approach and its limitations when technology and science lead to philosophy, and further to ethics and theology.[23] Therefore, as emeritus, Ivanov pursues research on current trends of informatics and science to be explained or countered by an understanding of the interface between information, philosophy of technology, and theology.[24] In this respect, and except for his adduction of theology which he shares with West Churchman, Ivanov may be seen as working along a stream of earlier criticism of the ideology of computer culture.[25] Such ideology can be seen as obviously rooted in earlier trends subsumed under the label "technocracy and the American dream",[26] and in the still earlier French revolution.,[27] the Age of Enlightenment or its controversial historical and theological roots.[28] Ivanov is convinced of the necessity of an explicit relation between theology and ethics in systems philosophy and practice, in order to avoid that technology remains an "excuse for questionable ethics" in the computer-supported edutainment and financial games of affluent societies.[29]

Publications

Ivanov published numerous articles and a few books, a selection:

References

  1. ^ a b c d Further biographical details.
  2. ^ Ivanov acknowledges (see further references in this article) that he has been partially influenced by Churchman's work as it is summarized in Churchman, C. W. (1971), The design of inquiring systems: Basic principles of systems and organization, New York: Basic Books, and Churchman, C. W. (1979), The systems approach and its enemies, New York: Basic Books.
  3. ^ Ivanov (1972).
  4. ^ Overriding by means of these two basic concept other unmeasurable analogues or derivatives like validity, reliability, dependability, correctness, timeliness, exactness, usefulness, consistency, authenticity, completeness, degree of detail, recency, controllability, goodness, trueness, relevance, pertinence, acceptability, refinement, approximation, currency, rightness, coverage, etc.
  5. ^ As summarized by Churchman, in the The design of inquiring systems, op.cit., chapter 9 on "Singerian inquiring systems".
  6. ^ With some historical roots in Mach, E. (1976). Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry (Vienna Circle Collection, Volume 3). New York: Reidel - Brian McGuinness. German orig. Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung, 1905. Complexity increases well beyond probability and statistics with the analysis of chance as in Massimo Negrotti (Ed.) (2008). Yearbook of the artificial: Natural chance, artificial chance. (Vol. 5). Bern, New York, Oxford: Peter Lang. (ISSN 1660-1084, ISBN 978-3-03911-476-4. See e.g. Galván, J.M. The case in Christian theological anthropology, pp. 129-141.) In a research report whose English title is From statistical control to control of statistics (1976), Ivanov summarizes such insights with a powerful quote from Clarence Irving Lewis "Knowledge has two opposites, ignorance and error.", Lewis, C.I. (1929) Mind and the world order: Outline of a theory of knowledge.
  7. ^ Ivanov (1995)
  8. ^ Wiki-Collaborative Web Application.
  9. ^ The subtitle of a classic by Gustave Le Bon (1895). English transl. The crowd: A study of the popular mind. Available on the Internet. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard's criticism of "Publikum" as crowd in Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846), translated as Kierkegaard, S. A Literary Review, Penguin Classics, 2001, ISBN 0-14-044801-2.
  10. ^ To appreciate the complexity of effectiveness, controversially synonym of efficacy as acknowledged in Ivanov's as in Churchman's work, see Jullien, F. (2004, orig. 1996) Treatise on efficacy, Univ. of Hawaii Press, incorporated into Ivanov, K., & Ciborra, C. U. (1998). East and West of IS. In W. R. J. Baets (Ed.), Proc. of the Sixth European Conference on Information Systems ECIS'98, University of Aix-Marseille III, Aix-en-Provence, June 4–6, 1998. Vol. IV (pp. 1740-1748). Granada & Aix-en-Provence: Euro-Arab Management School & Institut d'Administration des Enterprises IAE.
  11. ^ Ivanov. (1995).
  12. ^ Stivers, R. (1999). Technology as magic: The triumph of the irrational. New York: Continuum. (ISBN 0-8264-1211-4.)
  13. ^ Shapin, S. (1994). A social history of truth: Civility and science in seventeenth-century England. Chicago and London: The Univ. of Chicago Press. Esp. chap. 8 on "Invisible technicians".
  14. ^ See the program overview titled Essence of computers & presuppositions of support at Ivanov's research Website.
  15. ^ Ivanov's criticisms are found, for instance, in Ivanov (1991) and Ivanov (2001) Regarding design estheticism that followed and replaced Marxian trends in Scandinavia, Ivanov adduces the critique of post-Marxian aestheticism by Norris, C. (1990). What's wrong with postmodernism: Critical theory and the ends of philosophy. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. (Esp. pp. 16-30, 77-133, 263-282.) Ivanov perceives trends in computer and information science (where the design concept is grounded in design theory rather than systems theory) as related to variants of the intuitionism impersonated by Henri Bergson, or to problematic revisions of Aristotelian phronesis as expounded by Aubenque, P. (1993). La prudence chez Aristote, avec un appendice sur la prudence chez Kant [Prudence according to Aristotle, with an appendix on prudence according to Kant]. Quadrige/PUF. (First ed. 1963.)
  16. ^ Ivanov, K. (1993). Hypersystems: A base for specification of computer-supported self-learning social systems. In C. M. Reigeluth, B. H. Banathy, & J. R. Olson (Ed.), Comprehensive systems design: A new educational technology (pp. 381-407). New York: Springer-Verlag. (NATO ASI Series F: Computer and Systems Sciences, Vol 95.) Original research report.
  17. ^ In Shearmur, J. (1996). The political thought of Karl Popper. London: Routledge. See p. 106.
  18. ^ A complexity and controversiality which is evidenced, for instance, by (1) Frank, M., Larthomas, J.-P., & Philonenko, A. (1994). Sur la Troisième Critique: Textes rassemblés et présentés par Dominique Janicaud [On the third critique: Texts assembled by Dominique Janicaud]. Combas: Éditions de l'Éclat. Gramont, (2) David-Ménard, M. (1990). La folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg. [Madness in the pure reason: Kant reading Swedenborg]. Paris: Vrin, and (3) Gramont, Jérôme de. (1996). Kant et la question de l'affectivité: Lecture de la troisième critique. [Kant and the question of affectivity: Reading the third critique]. Paris: Vrin.
  19. ^ Examples are Hoos, I. R. (1983). Systems analysis in public policy: A critique (Rev. ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Dunn, E. S., Jr. (1974). Social information processing and statistical systems: Change and reform. New York: Wiley.
  20. ^ Ivanov, K. (1986). Systemutveckling och rättssäkerhet: Om statsförvaltningens datorisering och de långsiktiga konsekvenserna för enskilda och företag [Systems development and rule of law: On the computerization of public administration and it long-run consequences for citizens and business]. Stockholm: SAF. (ISBN 91 7152 404 5.)
  21. ^ On dangerous changes in America's approach to human rights see prof. Harold Hongiu Koh's (of Yale Law School) John Galway Foster lecture delivered in London on October 21st 2003, summarized in an invited article, "Rights to remember", in The Economist, November 1st 2003, pages 24-26. The relation to quality of information is evidenced in "Lexington: For their eyes only", in the journal's same issue, page 51. A political-philosophical analysis is offered by Giorgio Agamben in his book State of exception (2005), and his article on Security and terror, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2001. Reasons for concern are also raised by Lernerstedt, C. (2003). Kriminalisering: Problem och principer [Criminalization: Problems and principles]. Uppsala: Justus Förlag. English abstract.
  22. ^ See, for instance, the Websites Privacy International, and Statewatch - monitoring the state and civil liberties in Europe with its report The Shape of Things to Come - EU Future Group.(2008).
  23. ^ Ivanov, K. (2001). The systems approach to design, and inquiring information systems: Scandinavian experiences and proposed research program. Information Systems Frontiers, 3(1), 7-18. Abstract and orders.Original research report.
  24. ^ Following Mitcham, C., & Grote, J. (Eds.) (1984). Theology and technology: Essays in Christian analysis and exegesis. Lanham: University Press of America. (Esp. pp. 3-42, 53-119, 193-225. Bibliography of 478 entries.) Those who feel astonished to see such concern with theological matters are probably not aware of the struggles of many modern scientists like Newton and Heisenberg with these matters, as Heisenberg, W. (1975). Scientific and religious truth. In Across the frontiers (pp. 213-229). New York: Harper & Row. (P. Heath, Trans. Originally published as Schritte über Grenzen. Munich: R.Piper, 1971.)
  25. ^ Besides Churchman's main criticism of the artifacts of "artificial intelligence" in The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971), five examples of such criticism are: (1) Weizenbaum, J. (1976). Computer power and human reason. San Francisco: Freeman. (2) Truesdell, C. (1984). The computer: Ruin of science and threat to mankind. In C. Truesdell (Ed.), An idiot's fugitive essays on science (pp. 594-631). Berlin: Springer Verlag. (3) Roszak, T. (1986). The cult of information: The folklore of computers and the true art of thinking. New York: Pantheon Books. (4) Barrett, W. (1987). Death of the soul: From Descartes to the computer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (5) Stivers, R. (1999). Technology as magic: The triumph of the irrational. New York: Continuum. (ISBN 0-8264-1211-4.)
  26. ^ Akin, W. E. (1977). Technocracy and the American dream. Berkeley: University of California Press. (ISBN 0-520-03110-5.), and the still earlier Boguslaw, R. (1965). The new utopians: A study of system design and social change. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. See also Noble, D. (1997). The religion of technology: The divinity of man and the spirit of invention. New York: Knopf.
  27. ^ Weiss, J. H. (1982). The making of technological man: The social origins of French engineering education. Cambridge: MIT Press.
  28. ^ Such as accounted for by Persson, E. (2003). Shadows of cavernous shades: Charting the chiaroscuro of realistic computing. Lund university, Dept. of computer science. (Doctoral diss. ISSN: 1650-1268, ISBN 91-628-5512-3) Abstract. Or, more generally (not focused on computers) and less controversially, by Buckley, M.J., S.J. (1987) At the origins of modern atheism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  29. ^ The quoted expression is from the title of Ivanov's colleague, Mowshowitz, A. (2008). Technology as excuse for questionable ethics. AI & Society, Volume 22 (3, January), pp. 271-282. An overview of Ivanov's latest and ongoing research is available on the Internet.

External links