Kristo Ivanov

Biography

Ivanov was born in 1937 in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, and grew up and was educated in Italy and Brazil. In 1961 he moved to Sweden, where he worked as an 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. He has conducted further studies in political economy, business administration, and statistics, and obtained a degree in psychology at Lund University

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.

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.

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.

More specifically, his early work concentrated on the issue of accuracy and precision of data bases as they are related to system development and maintenance, where the systems approach is 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.

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. It resulted in widened definitions of information accuracy and precision that are grounded in the philosophy of science, especially theory of measurement or metrology, and its elusive but extremely important concept of error, 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.

This part of Ivanov's work parallels, and can be seen as a theoretical contribution to groupthink, to the wisdom of crowds and the Wiki-idea itself. It required, however, some reservations for problems of social psychology as implied by the study of popular mind. 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. In particular, the concept of quality-control of information contributed to the theoretical base of the so-called Scandinavian school of participatory design as related to computer-supported cooperative work by anchoring the politically and ideologically motivated action research which flourished in the seventies to a secure scientific conception of information and systems. The concept emphasizes the fundamental role of disagreement and of what in statistics is known as outliers. In doing so it accounts for the sociopsychological and political personalistic conflict between the individual and the collective.

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. Or is it a matter of naively understood trust? 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.

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.

Security

Ivanov views 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Publications

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