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Priority Area

Technology impacts every aspect of our lives—at multiple scales—from nanotechnology to satellite communication to technology for work and home life. These technologies are applied to all areas of human endeavor, from building a sustainable world, to improving human health, to transforming the way we teach and learn. SFU researchers are involved in new technology creation at all levels: creating the new materials that enable those technologies; engaging in design research and developing creative technologies that change how we interact with technology and each other; developing new types of hardware to enable future platforms like quantum computers; writing the algorithms required to process data and model the world around us as well as critiquing and educating people about the effects of those algorithms; and integrating and adapting existing technologies to a changing world. The adoption and use of emerging technologies are guided by management and policy research as one means to create economic and societal value and to engage in critical modelling of alternative technological futures. These research domains investigate the economic, environmental, health, political, educational and societal tradeoffs between incumbent industries and technologies and the emerging alternatives. SFU researchers also study the processes that underlie the adoption and use of new technologies—the process of bringing technologies “out of the lab” and into the hands of consumers and communities, as well as inequalities in technological uptake and impacts.

(SDGs 9, 12)