Let me introduce to you ISIS, the organization hosting the Summit in spring 2015.
ISIS was founded in the aftermath of the Fourth International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science (FIS) in Beijing in August 2010 as a new framework for transdisciplinary, global research to support scientists and research institutions worldwide in their efforts to inquire information. In its bylaws it was agreed that the term of presidency will last for two years and every president has to host a conference at the end of his period.
These are the Founding Presidents of ISIS. On the left, Professor Kang Ouyang, Vice-President of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China, and Director of SISI, the Social Information Science Institute, at the same university. In the middle, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Informatics, Vienna University of Technology, Austria. And on the right, Dr Pedro C. Marijuán, Senior Researcher at the Institute of Health Sciences of Aragón in Zaragoza, Spain, who initiated in the 90s the Foundations of Information Science movement
Faithfull to this agreement, Wolfgang Hofkirchner will host the next conference in Vienna. As ISIS is constituted as an umbrella organization, we want to cover all aspects of information and invite a wide range of researchers and those who need to use results of information studies for their specific application.
ISIS sees information as a central term in philosophy, humanities, art and science and wants to encourage a trandisciplinary perspective to discuss it. Therefore we want to invite other organizations being involved in one or several of the above mentioned areas to join us hosting this conference by contributing to a conference track or a conference stream as a partner.
Robert Jahn
Secretary General, ISIS
need we to rename our society?
there were a few feedbacks that said we should consider changing the abbreviation of isis, since “isis” is discredited politically.
i don’t see a need. first of all, the jihadists don’t own the abbreviation. actually, it was only months that they used it. now they call themselves “is” (islamic state). second, there is a plenty of organisations that use the same abbreviation. when we looked for a free domain name back in 2010, we didn’t find one with “isis” that was free. even the institute close to my institute at the technical university has it: it is the institute for software engineering and information systems – isis.
that is, many organisations were first to use “isis”. the jihadists were late. should all of the first ones abstain from naming them as they did because of the episode with the jihadist? i guess it makes no sense.
-wolfgang hofkirchner
Numbers Talk
Information has a subjective component, as it is the individual who recognises patterns in his environment and decides that the pattern and the deviation from the pattern is information.
There are patterns among the natural numbers. Some are obvious, some need pointing out. The upcoming conference may be an event to point out patterns in society, biology and also among numbers.