Professor Grandon Gill, from the University of South Florida will present the Department of Computer Science colloquium with a talk entitled, "Incorporating Evolutionary Fitness into Design Science".  

Over the past decade, design science has become an increasingly important area of information systems research. Typically, such research has focused on maximising the utility of artifacts, where “utility” tends to be interpreted as “usefulness”. In evolution, however, a broader concept of fitness is seen to be more significant than the immediate survivability of an organism. The presentation and subsequent discussion is intended to examine how designing systems to maximize fitness might differ from designing to maximise usefulness.

 Grandon Gill is a professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences department of the University of South Florida, where he also serves as Academic Director of the Doctor of Business Administration program at the Muma College of Business. He received his AB (cum laude) from Harvard College and an MBA (high distinction) and DBA from Harvard Business School. His areas of research include the transdisciplinary study of informing systems, complexity and the application of evolutionary fitness concepts to business, education and design. He has published nearly a hundred journal articles, book chapters and case studies, authored and/or edited six books and served as principal investigator on several grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and Department of Defense. He currently acts as Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline and the Journal of IT Education: Discussion Cases, and is also both a Governor and a Fellow of the Informing Science Institute. In 2014, he was the inaugural recipient of the Zbigniew Gackowski Award for lifetime contributions to informing science research and was honored in a special issue of the journal Management Decision for his contributions to case writing. In 2015, he was awarded a three summer Fulbright Scholar grant to work with South African universities in the development of discussion case studies relating to e-skills.