Imogen Wright
Imogen Wright (they/them) is a South African software engineer and bioinformatician who has spent the last two decades trying to make complex systems behave—in theoretical physics, HIV drug resistance and COVID genomics, healthcare communications, cloud technologies and even ad tech. They studied computer science and physics at Rhodes University, completed a masters in theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute (where Stephen Hawking was guest of honour at their graduation), and earned a PhD in bioinformatics from the University of the Western Cape. Imogen co-founded Hyrax Biosciences, whose Exatype software helps track HIV drug resistance across Africa and assembled the first Omicron variant SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Their work has been recognised by the Innovation Prize for Africa, various publications, two patents, and a long list of disasters that now fuel their favourite stories.
Session
We live in a golden age of programming paradigms and frameworks, all promising correctness, reproducibility, and even provability. And yet anyone who ships production code will, on a long enough timeline, become a connoisseur of failure. This is doubly true in tech-for-good initiatives, where the true complex system is a constrained society that doesn’t care how polished your code is. In this talk, I remix Richard Cook’s How Complex Systems Fail into a tour of unintended consequences, questionable decisions (mostly mine), and lessons learned, forgotten, and learned again over 20 years of trying to make the world better with computers. I hope you’ll leave with fewer “root cause” fairy tales, more humane failure modes in life and work, and maybe a little less fear of pressing deploy on your dreams.