Katina Michael

Katina Michael is the inaugural program director of the MBA (Technology and Digital Strategy) at The University of Sydney Business School. She is professor of Strategy, Innovation and Technology. She is a transdisciplinary scholar who connects technical, policy, and public audiences, raising awareness of socio-technical challenges and how to address them through human-centered design.

In 2008, Katina commenced a Master of Transnational Crime Prevention at the University of Wollongong, focusing on intelligence within the domains of policing and national security. Her research into data science, big data analytics, geographic information systems (GIS), machine learning, and surveillance studies provides a distinctive lens through which to critically examine emergent policing paradigms, including predictive policing and intelligence-led policing. Katina specialises in open-source intelligence (OSINT), with particular expertise in the limitations of information-dependent systems, especially in relation to signal-to-noise ratios, data reliability, and the challenges of extracting actionable intelligence from increasingly complex information environments.

While she was still doing her PhD, Katina was employed as a pre-sales engineer at a transnational telecommunications vendor, Nortel Networks. She credits her international perspective on the opportunities she was granted between 1996-2001 to work on critical and emerging technologies in many countries that were undergoing deregulation in the telecommunications sector, especially throughout Asia. She learnt first-hand how important new technologies were to traditional brick-and-mortar business and to startups and their strategy.

As a senior member of the IEEE Society on the Social Implications of Technology, and with a cross-disciplinary background in technology, law and business, Katina not only does research on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of emerging technology but on how to mitigate risks through better design approaches, technical standards, policies, and regulation that is enforceable. She is an advocate of systemic change through the adoption of new business models, such as public interest technology, that are not solely based on economics, but on principled innovation.

What purpose our socio-technical systems serve, and how sustainable into the long-term they will be, directly will impact the flourishing of people and planet.