I'm originally from Israel. I grew up in a small communal village for most of my childhood. I spent two years in the states as a mathematician in Illinois then I moved to Canada. I spent fifteen years in Canada for my PhD and later was a professor at the University of Alberta. I enjoy doing outdoors, hiking, strolls. I'm a family person, I spend a lot of time with my family, reading books, music.

I did my undergraduate at Israel Institute of Technology, it’s a quite reputable institution, Israel’s best engineering school. I studied industrial engineering and management, they added a bit of management flavor to industrial engineering, and information system was a joint program between that department and the computer science department. So this is what I studied.People get a variety of jobs once they graduate from this program. I can give you a couple of examples based on my own industry experience. Some people work on managerial support in engineering firms. It can be on production floors, planning and scheduling and classical industrial engineering jobs. Some people take business orientation, working in consulting firms. My first job was in consulting firm.Other people specially those specializing in information systems go for IT related jobs whether on administrative side or in development and others take positions is project management mostly in hardware, software firms.My personal career, I started consulting and I worked a bit in startups. My last job was operations manager at an International Software house. This will give you a sense of kind of jobs people take up on graduating.

Very broadly, I try to link the behavioral sciences and the design sciences. I like creating those bridges. This can go both ways, a little bit of work where you can ground systems design into theoretical foundation and I have other works where I look at how IT technology changes the way we organize and do more. So, it can go both ways.Generally speaking, I am very problem focused. I tackle a particular domain and employ variety of risk methodologies, often working with collaborators that bring strength in this area. I work with Psychologists, Sociologists and Mathematicians and people from broad spectrums. I also like to cross the boundaries, for example, in my PhD dissertation committee, we have people from information science, computer science and the business school. I'm active in both the IS field, IS jn general and also the organization science and also ACI community and to a certain extent, information science.In terms of a particular research project, early on, I work on information retrieval, search engine and collaborative filtering. I’m very much on the design side. I slowly move the condition to behavioral domains.And in recent years, my research is very much focused on understanding online production communities. People come together to produce knowledge based goods. I’m less interested in Twitter or Facebook which mostly converse, I’m interested in how they build products like Quora, Wikipedia and Citizen Science projects.I know very little about many topics, I’m a Jack of all trades, which allows me to create collaboration and often you need the person not to bring discipline but to bring expertise and leadership on the domain and methodologies. I really think there is a lot a value in creating bridges and taking it from one discipline to the other.