Distinguished Professor of Information Science, Syracuse University School of Information Studies

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.

Picture of Kevin

His research examines the futures of work made possible by the use of information and communication 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. Specific domains of interest include citizen science projects, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) support for programming, data science teamwork and the future of journalism.

His current project is a study of the impacts of the use of GAI tools for programming on programming skill development and retention, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (grant G-2025-79202). He was recently a PI on an NSF HCC project: "Intelligent support for non-experts to navigate large information spaces" (21-06865) and PI on an NSF FW-HTF grant, "The Future of News Work: Human-Technology Collaboration of Journalistic Research and Narrative Discovery" (21-29047). With colleagues, he headed a Research Coordination Network to develop a socio-technical perspective on work in the age of intelligent machines.

He is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Information, Technology and People and was formerly editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Social Computing. He is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 

SCImago Journal & Country Rank 
a word cloud of research: information, science, management

Other past grants include:

  • NSF INSPIRE project: "INSPIRE: Teaming Citizen Science with Machine Learning to Deepen LIGO's View of the Cosmos" (15-47880)
  • NSF CHS project: "Supporting Stigmergic Coordination” (16-18444)
  • NSF SOCS Grant 09-68470 for "SOCS: Socially intelligent computing to support citizen science" (see here for details).
  • OCI Grant 09-43049 for "VOSS: Theory and design of virtual organizations for citizen science" (see here for more details).
  • CNS Grant 07-08437 for "Collaborative Research: CRI: CRD: Data and analysis archive for research on Free and Open Source Software and its development" (with Megan Conklin, Elon University). This project supported work on the FLOSSmole data repository.
  • HSD 05-27457, "DHB: Investigating the Dynamics of Free/Libre Open Source Software Development Teams" (with Robert Heckman and Elizabeth Liddy). You can find the project home page for this project here.
  • IIS Grant 04-14482, "How can document-genre metadata improve information-access for large digital collections?" (with Barbara Kwasnik). You can see this project's home page here.
  • "A Multi-Method Study of the Use of Information Technology in the Real-Estate Industry" (see this project's home page here).
  • "Tools for Inventing Organizations: Toward a Handbook of Organizational Processes"

Prior to moving to Syracuse, he taught for five years at the University of Michigan Business School. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Zürich, Institute for Informatics, 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 a former Chair for IFIP Working Group 8.2 (Information Systems and Organizations) and the Academy of Management Organizational Communications and Information Systems Division. He was a member of the socio-cultural working group for the DataONE project.