My Research Philosophy

I see myself as doing research in the field of Information Technology. To fully appreciate the implications of this, consider my perspective of how information technology relates to other terms often used in combination.

I see technology as the culmination of scientific effort, being applied in such a way that it makes economic sense within a specific social setting. The degrees in which the 3 areas are considered (obviously) differ from case to case. This allows technology to sometimes be much "simpler" than what may be the general connotation thereof. Consider the example of the using a piece of rope to form a single queue at multiple service points at a business. Everybody nowadays (in South Africa at least) are quite used to this setup. Why do I think that that is an example of technology?

There is certainly a scientific component to it. Queues can be modelled mathematically and different scenarios can be simulated at little cost and no inconvenience to customers. In this case the scientific effort that goes into the rope, probably is not that great (?!), but I can see that in some other rope technology applications that may very well be different. The solution, furthermore, makes economic sense, in that it could allow more customers to be served per time unit. In addition this solution operates in a specific social context: customers got frustrated because they felt that they always ended up in the queue with the person with the most problems in front - they would then wait forever while the next queue goes at ten times the speed. Also, there may very well be certain types of circumstances where this would not work - for example, where a specialized service is rendered at a service point a single queue does not make sense! These three aspects of technology would obviously be of different importance in different scenarios. (In fact the single queue example demonstrates another belief of mine: Although science, best practice etc all are very important, nothing beats thinking.)

Information Technology is a subset of technology in general. As such it deals with technologies that deal with information processing. These technologies, in my opinion, includes all facets of information management -- from design and analysis, the communication networks, to the storage and processing of information. It follows that these systems would more often than not be computer-based. In my research vision I see a world where ambient computing assist us to live better lives. How? Mostly by freeing up time for things we'd rather do...