Marcus Foth

Marcus Foth is Professor of Urban Informatics in the QUT Design Lab and a Chief Investigator in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Faculty of Creative Industries, Education, and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Marcus’ research brings together people, place, and technology.

His current research foci include: urban media and geoprivacy; data care in smart cities; digital inclusion and participation; blockchain and food supply chains, and; sustainability and more-than-human futures.

For two decades, Marcus has led ubiquitous computing and interaction design research into interactive digital media, screen, mobile and smart city applications. Since founding the Urban Informatics Research Lab at QUT in 2006, urban informatics has been adopted worldwide by industry (e.g., McKinsey, Intel, CISCO) and universities (e.g., NYU, University College London, Warwick, Northeastern). His leadership in establishing the field was recognised in 2017 by the Australian Computer Society inducting Marcus as a Fellow for ‘a sustained and distinguished contribution to the field of computer science’ and by the Australian and New Zealand Governments, which included urban informatics as a new field of research in their 2020 Standard Research Classification.

Marcus has published more than 250 peer-reviewed publications. His h-index is 54 with 10,000+ citations (Google Scholar).

In 2021, Marcus was appointed to serve a three year term on the national College of Experts of the Australian Research Council (ARC). He was also named a 2021 Distinguished Member of the international Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for his outstanding scientific contributions to the field of computing.

The outputs of Marcus’ research have received many awards. For example, the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer Toolkit received the 2021 National Award for Cutting Edge Research of the Planning Institute of Australia for significantly accelerating the calculation of value uplift in linear infrastructure projects such as rail networks. His BeefLedger project was recognised as a 2020 Good Design Australia Award winner twice: in the commercial services category and for design strategy, for demonstrating tangible benefits and impact of blockchain and smart contract applications for industry. Nominated by the Smart Cities Council Australia / New Zealand, Marcus was awarded ICT Researcher of the Year 2017 (Gold Disruptor) by the Australian Computer Society.

Marcus has made substantial contributions to academic service, including being conference chair of OZCHI 2009, Communities & Technologies 2011, and ACM SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems 2016. He is an active reviewer, associate chair, and editorial board member for various conferences and journals. In recognition of his service, he received the 2018 Publons Peer Review Award (cross-field), which honours the top 1% of reviewers.

Marcus is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and has been giving invited keynote talks and presentations at international conferences and leading research institutions, including Aalto, Aarhus, Harvard, IT University of Copenhagen, KAIST, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, MIT, Oulu, Oxford, Politecnico di Milano, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tongji, Tsinghua.