roundtable: Re: personal background

roundtable: Re: personal background

Re: personal background

Rob Kling (kling@ics.uci.edu)
Sat, 13 May 1995 11:35:37 -0700 

To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: personal background 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 May 1995 09:39:24 EDT."
             <950509192045_112846390@aol.com> 
Date: Sat, 13 May 1995 11:35:37 -0700
From: Rob Kling <kling@ics.uci.edu>
Message-Id:  <9505131135.aa07542@q2.ics.uci.edu>


Hi,

After receiving a faceless missive in cyberspace .... you might find
this  short bio helpful in providing some personal context.

Best wishes,

Rob Kling
<kling@ics.uci.edu>
------------


                                Rob Kling
              Professor of Information and Computer Science
                 University of California, Irvine (UCI)
                                     
Rob Kling grew up in Northern New Jersey. He completed his
undergraduate studies at Columbia University (1965) and his
graduate studies, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, at
Stanford University (1967, 1971). Between 1966 and 1971 he
held a research appointment in the Artificial Intelligence
Center at the Stanford Research Institute. He held his first
professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison between
1970-1973. And he has been on the faculty of UCI since 1973.
Dr. Kling also holds professorial appointments at UCI's
Center for Research on Information Technology and
Organizations and Graduate School of Management. Since the
early 1970s he has studied the social opportunities and
dilemmas of computerization for managers, professionals,
workers, and the public. 

Dr. Kling's current research focuses on the ways that
computerization is a social process with technical elements,
how intensive computerization transforms work, and how
computerization entails many social choices. He has also
studied the ways that complex information systems and expert
systems are integrated into the social life of organizations. He
has conducted studies in numerous kinds of organizations,
including local governments, insurance companies,
pharmaceutical firms, and hi-tech manufacturing firms. He
has written about the value conflicts implicit in and social
consequences of computerization which directly effects the
public. He is currently studying the effective use of digital
libraries to support research and teaching, and the conditions
that foster effective public use of the emerging National
Information Infrastructure ("data superhighways").

Dr. Kling is co-author of Computers and Politics: High
Technology in American Local Governments (Columbia
University Press, 1982) which examined how computerization
reinforces the power of already powerful groups. He is
co-editor of PostSuburban California: The Transformation of
Postwar Orange County (University of California Press, 1990)
examines the way that Orange County California is organized
in a new social form beyond the traditional city and suburb,
one that is spatially decentralized, functionally specialized,
and mixes a rich array of residences, commerce, industry,
services, government and the arts. PostSuburban California won
the Thomas Athearn Award from the Western Historical
Society in 1992 and will be reissued in paperback by the
University California Press in 1995. Computerization and
Controversy: Value Conflicts & Social Choices (Academic Press,
1991) examines the social controversies about computerization
in organizations and social life, regarding productivity,
worklife, personal privacy, risks of computer systems, and
computer ethics. (Dr. Kling is the sole editor of a
substantially rewritten 2nd edition of  Computerization and
Controversy that Academic Press will publish in August 1995.)

In addition, his research has been published in over 85
journal articles and book chapters. He has presented
numerous conference papers, given invited lectures at many
major universities and the National Academy of Sciences, and
given keynote and plenary talks at conferences in the United
States, Canada and Western Europe. He has consulted for
private firms, non-profit organizations, the Congress of the
United States, and two foreign governments about the
opportunities and problems of computerization. His current
service includes membership on the Executive Committee of
the US ACM Committee for Computers and Public Policy,
membership on an NII advisory committee for the Office of
Technology Assessment (US Congress), membership on the
program committee of a national conference about future
directions for CS research (Society and the Future of
Computing), and serving as a track chair to the 1995
Conference on Organizational Computing Systems.

Dr. Kling is co-director of UCI's doctoral concentration on
Computing, Organizations, Policy and Society. He is on the
editorial and advisory boards of several scholarly and
professional journals including Communications of the ACM,
ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Information
Technology and People, Social Science Computer Review,
Accounting, Management and Information Technology,  and
Information Society. He has also organized special workshops
about the social and managerial aspects of computerization,
served on the program committees of several major national
conferences, and was Chair of an international working group
on the Social Accountability of Computing.

Dr. Kling has been a visiting Professor at the Copenhagen
School of Business and Economics and at the Solvay School of
Business at the University of Brussels. He has also been a
Research Fellow at Harvard University's Program on
Information Resources Policy and a Visiting Researcher at the
Gessellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung in Bonn,
FRG.

Dr. Kling's scholarly and professional accomplishments have
been recognized nationally and internationally. In 1987 he was
awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences by the Free
University of Brussels. In 1983 he received a Silver Core
Award from the International Federation of Information
Processing Societies. In 1984 he received a Service Award from 
the Association for Computing Machinery.

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