The Institute for Information Management and Control announces that Dr. Soheil Human, assistant professor at IMC and the director of the Sustainable Computing Lab, has been awarded the MyData Global Awards for 2024 and 2025. The recognition highlights the institute’s commitment to advancing information systems research that responds to significant organisational and societal challenges, and reflects IMC’s leadership in shaping digitally sustainable, accountable, and human-compatible sociotechnical systems.

Innovating Privacy Management, Consenting and Digital Protection Through Information Systems Research

The awarded work draws on a series of projects that reimagine privacy management, consenting, and digital protection from an information-systems perspective. A central contribution is the Advanced Digital Protection Control (ADPC) framework, an open and interoperable infrastructure designed to facilitate clear and trustworthy exchanges of digital rights and privacy-related information and decisions across digital services. ADPC is conceived as a sociotechnical system that integrates organisational processes, legal requirements, usability principles, and technical interoperability, addressing long-standing inefficiencies and inconsistencies in conventional consenting practices.

By enabling user preferences and rights-related decisions to be communicated and enforced across browsers, mobile applications, IoT devices, and immersive environments, ADPC demonstrates how the thoughtful design of information systems can support digitally sustainable models of protection. Related work on children’s privacy further shows how enforceable, transparent, and accountable mechanisms can be embedded across platforms and devices, particularly where vulnerable users and multi-stakeholder responsibilities intersect.

IMC’s Leadership in Digital Sustainability and Sociotechnical Transformation

The recognition affirms IMC’s strategic focus on the development, analysis, and governance of complex information systems that shape organisational behaviour and societal processes. Research at the institute investigates how sociotechnical infrastructures influence decision-making, coordination, control, and trust, and how more sustainable and equitable digital environments can be designed.

Through interdisciplinary collaborations that link information systems engineering, management science, computer science, cognitive science and the social sciences, IMC advances frameworks that strengthen responsible digital practices, human agency, and organisational resilience. The projects honoured by the MyData Global Awards reflect this mission by demonstrating how rigorous cross-disciplinary research can yield practical innovations that enhance the sustainability and accountability of digital protection systems.

A Research Profile Grounded in Digital Sustainability

The distinction highlights contributions led by Soheil Human within IMC’s broader research ecosystem. His work combines insights from cognitive science, AI, digital sustainability, and information systems to develop inclusive, evidence-based, and human-compatible approaches to digital protection. The achievements acknowledged by the MyData Global Awards align closely with IMC’s ambition to shape sociotechnical systems that promote sustainable, resilience and trustworthy digital transformation across organisations and society.