Steve Easterbrook Professor, Department of Computer Science. University of Toronto,  40 St George Street,  Toronto, Ontario M5S 2E4,  Canada.  Phone: +1 (416) 978 3610  Email: sme@cs.toronto.edu Blog: Serendipity Twitter: @SMEasterbrook Pinterest: smeasterbrook Prezi: Easterbrook

Member of the graduate faculty of the Centre for Environment
Member of the Centre for Global Change Science
Member of the Editorial Board for Geoscientific Model Development

Previously:

• 1990-1995 - tenured faculty at the School of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK
• 1995-1999 - lead scientist at the NASA Independent Verification and Validation Facility in Fairmont, WV, USA.

Research Interests

My research interests focus on the contributions of computing and software to the challenge of dealing with climate change. I like to use the label climate informatics to describe what I do. I've been studying how climate scientists develop computational models to improve their understanding of earth systems and climate change. When I started this work, I was really focussed on how they work as a software development community. But recently I've begun to explore the broader question of how they operate as a knowledge community.

My earlier work focussed on systems analysis for complex software-intensive systems, particularly questions such as how the views of different stakeholders can be compared and merged; the role of modelling for understanding and communicating key ideas about systems; software verification and validation and how it affects software quality; and the social and cognitive processes that support coordination within teams of software developers. I'm also interested in the broader question of how software development re-shapes human activities, or more accurately, how human activities and software systems co-evolve, each shaping the other in important ways.

Projects:

• Fostering trans-disciplinary research around climate change
• E.g. See our trans-disciplinary lecture series; I'm also interested in how software infrastructures support this
• Software for collective decision-making around climate change policies
  • E.g. See the tool we're building to support open collaborative quantitative decision-making
• The software development processes and software quality factors in climate modeling.
  • E.g. See the results of a recent study on how climate scientists build and validate climate simulations.
  • The November 2011 Special Issue of IEEE Software
• Research methodologies (and especially empirical research methods) in Software Engineering
  • E.g. see my grad course on Empirical Methods and a recent book chapter on how to select a research method.
• Modeling and Reasoning in the Presence of Inconsistency
  • E.g. see our TOSEM paper on multi-valued model checking and our our ASE'03 paper on model merging

My Students:

Publications: the full list

Some talks and tutorials I have given:

• A Prezi on The history of climate models. Part of a talk I gave at Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, in June 2012. (More Prezis here)
• Empirical Research Methods in Requirements Engineering. Tutorial given at RE'07, New Delhi, India, Oct 2007.
• Scale Changes Everything: Understanding the Requirements for Systems-of-Systems. Keynote Talk given at ICCBSS'07 (Feb 2007)
• Bugs in the Space Program: The role of software in systems failure. Keynote Talk given at INCOSE'05 (July 2005)
• An introduction to category theory for software engineers. Tutorial given at ASE'98 (Oct 1998).
• How to write a PhD Thesis - A talk I give from time to time to motivate grad students - last given on 29 Nov 2012. (Et maintenant, en Français, grâce à Markus W. Gehring et Sabrina Alanis)

Patents held: Patents? Why on earth would I have patents? I'm a scientist, dammit. Patents only get in the way of open dissemination of research results.

Teaching

Please note: all teaching materials on my website are made available under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. Feel free to use and adapt this material, but respect the terms of this licence. If you would like original powerpoint files, please contact me.

• Currently (winter 2013) I'm teaching:,
  • a first year Arts and Science seminar course: PMU199 - Climate Change: Software, Science and Society
  • new graduate class: CSC2602 - Computational Models of Climate Change
• Past courses:
  • CSC2130 - Empirical Software Engineering (last taught winter 2012)
  • DGC2003 - Systems Thinking for Global Problems (last taught summer 2012)
  • CSC2600 - Topics in Computer Science - Climate Change Informatics (last taught winter 2007)
  • CSC2106 - Requirements Engineering (last taught summer 2005)
  • my 3rd year SE course: CSC302 - Engineering Large Software Systems (last taught winter 2012)
  • an old undergrad class CSC340F - Requirements Engineering (last taught: fall 2006)
  • an old undergrad course: CSC444F - Software Engineering I (last taught: fall 2001).

Other interests

• Our cats were among the first felines to have a web presence (back in '93), but sadly they are no longer with us.
• We mainly eat kid-friendly food these days, but given the chance I do love to cook (using vegetarian recipes)
• Music that sounds good enough to eat: Gazpacho!
• Photography. But I haven't yet bought a digital camera don't have time to upload my pictures, so this link doesn't work.
• Making cakes for the kids.