Steve Easterbrook Director, School of the Environment 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 Mastodon: fediscience.org/@steve Pinterest: smeasterbrook Prezi: Easterbrook Buy my new book: "Computing the Climate: How we know what we know about climate change". Now available from Cambridge University Press! Member of the Sustainability Informatics research group Member of the graduate faculty of the School of the Environment Member of the Centre for Global Change Science 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 focuses on climate informatics, and more specifically, the applications of computer science and software engineering to the challenge posed by global climate change. I have completed a series of case studies of the software development processes used by computational scientists for development of Earth System Models. See for example:

• Alexander, K. and Easterbrook, S. M. (2015) The software architecture of climate models: a graphical comparison of CMIP5 and EMICAR5 configurations, Geoscientific Model Development, 8, 1221-1232, doi:10.5194/gmd-8-1221-2015.
• S. M. Easterbrook (2014). Open code for open science? Nature Geoscience, 7(11), 779-781.

I am also investigating the role of computational models in teaching key concepts in climate science, and the application of web-based collective intelligence tools to the development of consensus solutions to climate change. Some of this work focusses on the idea of Systems Thinking as a key strategy in understanding. See for example:

• S. M. Easterbrook (2014) "From Computational Thinking to Systems Thinking: A conceptual toolkit for sustainability computing". Proceedings, Second International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S 2014), Stockholm, Sweden, August 24-27, 2014
• Becker, C., Chitchyan, R., Duboc, L., Easterbrook, S. M., Penzenstadler, B., Seyff, N., Venters, C., (2015) Sustainability Design and Software: The Karlskrona Manifesto. Proceedings, 37th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, Florence, Italy, 16-24 May, 2015.

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. See for example:

• S. M. Easterbrook, E. Yu, J. Aranda, Y. Fan, J. Horkoff, M. Leica, and R. A. Qadir. Do Viewpoints Lead to Better Conceptual Models? An Exploratory Case Study. 13th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’05), Paris, France, Aug 29 – Sep 2 2005.
• S. M. Easterbrook and M. Chechik, "A Framework for Multi-Valued Reasoning over Inconsistent Viewpoints", Proceedings, 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-01), Toronto, Canada, May 12-19, 2001. IEEE Computer Society Press.

For a full list of papers, see my publications page

Other Projects:

• How to broaden the education of computer science students - increasing diversity of the undergrad student cohort, improving their ethical and ecological maturity, and equipping them with the skills to engage in inter-disciplinary work.
  • E.g. See for example the work of my student, Elizabeth Patitsas on gender diversity in computer science.
• 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

MSc students

• Hana Darling-Wolf

PhD students

• Wei Yu
• Soukayna Mouatadid
• James Williams
• Harshit Gujral
• Taneea S. Agrawaal
• Reyna Wu

Postdocs

• Zihaohan Sang
• Samar Sabie

Alumni

• Stephanie Knill. Currently working at uno.ai
• Levon Amatuni (Now a PhD student at the University of Leiden
• Elizabeth Patitsas (now an assistant professor at McGill)
• Susan Sim (now a lecturer the iSchool, U of Toronto)
• Mehrdad Sabetzadeh (now a senior research scientist at U Luxembourg)
• Nan Niu (now an assistant prof at U Cincinnati)
• Wendy Liu
• Jorge Aranda (now Lead Scientist at Limbic Consulting)
• Rick Salay (now a postdoc at U Toronto)
• Lin Mei
• Jon Pipitone (Currently studying for his MD at Queens U)
• Daniel Levy (Now working for IBM)
• Mahtab Sabet (Now Senior Software Engineer at Capital One in Toronto)
• Jonathan Lung (Now working at Sojourn Labs, which he co-founded)

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 (2022-23) I'm teaching:,
  • Nothing in 2023, as I've started a new term as Director of the School of Environment. I'll be teaching a new course Confronting the Climate Crisis in 2024.
• Past courses:
  • A School of Environment course: ENV361 Social Media and Environmentalism (last taught in the winter of 2018).
  • CSC300 Computers and Society (last taught in the fall of 2017).
  • My graduate Systems Thinking course, CSC2720 Systems Thinking for Global Problems (last taught in the winter of 2020.
  • A first year Arts and Science seminar course: PMU199 - Computing the Climate (last taught in the fall of 2016)
  • An Arts and Science "Big Ideas" course, BIG102Y The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet (last taught 2014-5; it evolved into ENV261 and ENV361)
  • DGC2003 - Systems Thinking for Global Problems (last taught summer 2013; it evolved into CSC2720)
  • A graduate class CSC2602 - Computational Models of Climate Change (last taught winter 2013)
  • CSC2130 - Empirical Software Engineering (last taught winter 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 have new cats! But no photos, just in case.
• We mainly eat kid-friendly food these days, but given the chance I do love to cook (using vegetarian recipes)
• Music about climate change: Seasons End; Devolution; Unsustainable.
• 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.