Christoph Becker

Christoph Becker is a Professor of Information and Director of the Digital Curation Institute at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the design of just and sustainable information and software systems, judgment and decision-making in systems design, social responsibility in computing, and digital curation.

Becker is one of the co-founders of the Karlskrona Manifesto for Sustainability Design and is the author of the book Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability.

Career
Becker received his BSc in Computer Science, MSc in Software Engineering, MSc in Economics and Computer Science, and Doctorate in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology. After completing his PhD in 2010 with a thesis on decision-making in digital preservation, he spent a winter in Lisbon as a visiting post-doctoral researcher with the Information Systems research group at IST Lisbon. He returned to Vienna to lead a research program on scalable decision support for digital preservation as part of the large-scale EC-funded project SCAPE: Scalable Preservation Environments, which he co-developed with an international consortium of universities, memory organizations, industrial research and commercial partners.

In 2013, he moved to Toronto, Canada to become an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Information and later an Associate Professor in 2018. Since 2014, he has served as the Director of the Digital Curation Institute, where he leads interdisciplinary research in digital curation along with appointed fellows, graduate students, faculty, researchers and industry partners. Becker is also an Associate Member of the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto.

His book Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability appears at MIT Press from June 2023.

Research
Becker’s current research focuses on sustainability and social justice within computing and system design and the use of critical theories to examine the politics, values and cognitive processes of design.

His previous research included digital sustainability through digital curation and preservation, archiving and digital libraries.

He has received funding from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Ontario Research Fund, Canada Foundation for Innovation, the European Commission’s Framework Program, the Vienna Science and Technology Fund, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, and the University of Toronto’s Connaught Fund.

Becker is an associate editor of the recently launched ACM Journal of Responsible Computing, a member of the program committees of ICSE, CHASE, ICT4S, Computing within Limits, and EASE, and a co-founder of TechOtherwise.

Works

 * Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability
 * Christoph Becker - Google Scholar

Public Writing

 * Christoph Becker, Andrew Clement. It’s time to defund Big Tech and empower communities. Toronto Star.
 * Christopher Frauenberger, Ann Light, Christoph Becker, Dawn Walker, Curtis McCord, Steve Easterbrook, Lisa Nathan, Irina Shklovski, Elizabeth Patitsas. Ein neuer Kompass für die digitale Zukunft. Kommentare der anderen, DerStandard.at

Awards

 * 2019: Best Paper award, 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S), for “Sidewalk and Toronto: Critical Systems Heuristics and the Smart City”.
 * 2019: W. Kaye Lamb Prize of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) for article “Metaphors We Work By: Reframing Digital Objects, Significant Properties and the Design of Digital Preservation Systems”
 * 2014: Best Demo award, Combined ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries & Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries Conference, for SCAPE Planning and Watch System
 * 2012: Digital Preservation Coalition: Digital Preservation Award for Research & Innovation in Digital Preservation for the PLANETS project (Digital Preservation Award - Wikipedia)
 * 2011: Shortlisted for the German/Austrian/Swiss computer science doctoral dissertation award.
 * 2010: German Association for the Advancement of Information Sciences: Thesis award for doctoral thesis, “Trustworthy preservation planning”.