I am Professor of Communication and Computing in departments of Computer Science and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. My mandate is to build a foundation for interdisciplinary efforts to address major societal challenges. You can get my formal bio and headshots here.
I work across fields and disciplines of HCI, Computer Science, Information Sciences, STS and Communication. The core themes in my work center around social lives and accountabilities in the digital society, the data challenges entailed in mobile devices and their applications, location tracking and surveillance, including situations of wars, crises and natural disasters. My main concern centers on the ethics, values and responsibilities that are enacted by designers and developers as they create our technological futures.
My goal is to address mundane interactions with data and the sense of powerlessness and discomfort that people often experience in their interactions with technology through research, public engagement and policy advocacy. We have built a digital world that remains as unfair and as unequal as ever, but it now also happens to be very creepy. I think we can do better than this.
Whether in studying war-torn Ukraine or spending time with European IoT developers struggling to think about ethics, the problems people in my studies encounter are similar because the source of many issues comes from the software infrastructures that underpin contemporary life. I think we need to figure out how to build technology much more wisely than we do now.
I joined the University of Copenhagen in 2020, but prior to that I spent many years at the IT University of Copenhagen first as an assistant and then as an associate professor. Before arriving in Denmark, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the department of Informatics in the Donald Bren school of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
In my spare time I enjoy downhill skiing, mountaineering and rock climbing. While I love Denmark, it does lack a bit of vertical landscape so I try to get out into the wilderness as often as possible.