Alex Voss

Email: alex.voss@st-andrews.ac.uk

Office: JC0.25

Phone: +44 (0)1334 46 3262

Web: https://avoss.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk

Alex is a computer scientist with a strong interest in the social sciences and philosophy. He holds a PhD from Edinburgh University and joined St Andrews in 2009 after a stint in Manchester.

At the moment, Alex is also a Technology Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and an Associate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard.

His research interests have most recently turned to the relationship between software engineering methods and negative social impacts of applications of information technologies in general and machine learning in particular. He is re-visiting an argument he made in his PhD thesis that the social relations of software engineering and, in particular, relations between software professionals and  stakeholders are at the heart of the question whether software systems are fit for purpose. Unfortunately, recent developments in software engineering seem to represent a regression on the matter of user-designer relations.