unc∞rdinated

  What was once my living room in Montreal. I fly to Copenhagen tomorrow, and with that I wrap up 20 years and change as a resident of North America. I came here in January 2006 as a 20 year old undergradutate transfer student to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Much and more has transpired since then. Family, career(s?), alphabets after the name. I leave behind in this continent things made of iron and stone and wood. I leave behind language in silico. I leave behaind self-perpetuating patterns of behavior.  I leave behind familiar things.

Sitting on my bed typing this, my apartment is in disarray. The movers come tomorrow, and everything we are taking with us to Denmark (aside from our suitcases) is packed into 22 small cartons, 9 plastic tubs, and 1 garment case. Books, stationery, clothes, a few toys, some mementos, coffee equipment, cast irons and Indian stainless steel and brass kitchenware. This is 20 years (13 for Aditi) of stuff we have accumulated in North America that we will take when we go. Reflecting on what w leave behind, I notice furniture, beds, linens, clothes, toys, almost everything in the kitchen, so many electronic devices and appliances and gadgets, so very many plants and ceramics. I remember that I left my car behind in Atlanta, 7 years ago. Headed to Copenhagen next Friday with Lara. Aditi will follow in a few weeks after getting in some more fieldwork. We have an apartment there already, and Lara and I will feather the nest in anticipation. I'd like to explore the city with her, maybe take ...

I'm working on an empirical project with two co-authors, where a significant part of the central phenomenon we are studying unfolded online on twitter.  We have a massive multi year tweet and factiva news corpus that we sense-make together by periodically meeting to discuss the data and to theorize qualitatively from algorithmically generated representations of and algorithmically sampled texts from the corpus, previously drawn models of the phenomenon, memos, manuscripts, etc. We each of us have varying familiarity/expertise around the special phenomenon, the substrate upon which it unfolds (online discourse), the theoretical/research conversation in which are participating, and NLP. In collaboration, we see things.  I'm currently working on creating a visual representation of key themes (based on a BERTopic model) in the corpus, in particular the twitter discourse, over time and across our own interpreted actor categories. An interesting macro pattern emerged in convers...

What is AI? I've written about this before , and given that it is an emerging technology, I understand that there are many conceptions of AI. In this post I'm referring specifically to generative AI. However, after having reviewed the Nth management/IS manuscript that treats genAI as some amorphous blob that does everything and nothing, and learns from everything and nothing, I decided I should try and break it down into components. My emphasis here is function and modularity of the various components that come together to perform "genAI". Will keep iterating on this for a class Samer is teaching.

I've been asked to offer some thoughts on fieldwork and data collection at a BricoLab meeting tomorrow, thought I could use this space to ruminate.  Not everything one comes across during fieldwork is "data". I think qualitative fieldwork is incredible because it produces profound knowledge about settings and phenomena. If one truly knows something they can write conceptual or theoretical pieces about it all day long. However knowing the phenomenon is not the same thing as having data about the phenomenon . And I am ultimately an empiricist and I need data.  I also want to recognize that its not as simple as data/not data. Its not a binary. I believe there is a continuum of data-ness of knowing from qualitative fieldwork, along the dimension of reflecting + encoding.  Let me try to explain what I mean by that... You come out of a session in the field, an observation session, and interview, whatever. You are buzzing with excitement about what you have discovered, yo...

Pranipaatena, pariphrashnena, sevaya. It's a triad of words that has been on my mind a lot. The source paragraph from the Gita opens my dissertation monograph. The proximal trigger was signing my contract as Assistant Professor (tenure track), at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School.  I lettered this on site, at the Paradise tattoo parlour on rue Sherbrooke earlier today. It was transferred on to my skin, and tattooed over by Seb. I love the result. I have lettered this exact triad often, but it doesn't always come off. I wanted to do it in one shot, no take backsies, in the moment. Whatever lands on the page is what goes on my skin. So there was a thrill, of a sort. It’s not perfect. The second na in pariprashnena is a bit off. The sa at the beginning of sevaya is a bit small.  And of course, once it was scanned, Seb aligned the three words. And the resulting tattoo is as much his interpretation of my template at it is mine. Subtle choices about h...

  Alrighty, I done done it folks.  I'm a doctor doctor! I defended the PhD on the 24th of March 2026. Its been seven years and I can hardly believe it. I showed up at the office the next day at 8:30AM not knowing what to do with myself. Got some entirely voluntary revisions to take care of, but yeah its a clean pass. Done-zo.  And now I can happily reveal that I have accepted a position as Assistant Professor, Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School!  Jeg vil gerne være en god adjunkt, og en god mand, og en god far. Så... livet på dansk!

My defense next month will mark the end(ish) of a period in my life when I chose to do a smaller set of things. Partly me getting older and needing fewer parallel projects, partly out of respect for the process of getting a doctorate. This reflection is driven in part by the big digital footprint migration I mentioned in the previous post , transferring my old blogs and microsites from abhardwaj.net to anandb.net, making sure all the old links forward correctly. Made me go through traces of paused interests.  I'm looking forward to doing more things again.  1. Art.  My medium of the moment is calligraphy. I'm working on the text for a tattoo. I havent decided exactly what its going to be, but do know it'll be around this verse from the Gita that's been  on my mind  for a while. Sailor Manyo Nekoyanagi in a Pilot Parallel 6mm and Parker Quink Black in a Pilot Parallel 2.4mm  2. Fountain Pens.  Well, this one never really stopped, but the last few new pe...

Its one of those days... I'm reasonably ahead of schedule on all deliverables.  Conference reviews (x7) done. Defense scheduled (March 24th!) + slides ready + 30 min core content recorded for playback/prep. Revision on COVID manuscript done and sitting with Samer. Materials for Jt. Prog PhD Symposium AI workshop prepped. Materials for ASAC Systems Thinking PDW prepped. Outline memo for ICIS short paper with <AE> written. Pipeline memo for next 2 years written. Good draft of job market paper written and percolating. Data analysis for <JS+RN> way ahead of schedule. I'm running out of things to do. So I migrated my digital footprint from abhardwaj.net to anandb.net. If you're reading this on blog.anandb.net then my migration was successful across all allied and microsites.  I guess the elephant sitting in my office with my while I twiddle my thumbs is my future. And my lack of knowledge of what it is going to look like. I dont like this feeling. I dont need a ton o...

I submitted my dissertation to external examiners last week. It sort of occurred to me several days later that this was probably a meaningful milestone. I have written something (hopefully) minimal edits from my second doctoral dissertation. Cool. AI as a concept is central to the dissertation, and one of the threads I set up in the literature chapter is the idea of instability in meaning of emerging technologies, which get stabilized at the social level. AI can be so many things because people imagine it to be many things. And so what is AI? Or perhaps more accurately, what do people imagine AI to be? I'd like to argue for systems characterized by learning , autonomy , and communicativeness . I'm reflecting on a vignette I captured from attending a meeting between the developers and people from the hospital. It didn't make it into the dissertation, but it stuck with me. One of the developers describes some cascading prioritization logic that was built into the OR scheduli...