Though government representatives shun away and people forget, investigative journalism has picked up the ball. It’s still on the agenda: the Snowden leaks.

It’s an ironic coincidence that in a town that stood in the focus when Wikileak’s Julian Assange set the U.S. on a wrong track and a presidential aircraft coming from Moscow had to undergo a stop and search for a stowaway, a conference on the information society puts its focus on the role IT has in political, military, and business contexts. (Among others, last autumn an Austrian journalist, Erich Moechel, who has written long time ago about Echelon, supposedly revealed the location of the “Vienna Annex” mentioned in the Snowden documents – an NSA communication interception station of a special kind: From the peak of the IZD Tower the headquarters of the United Nations in Vienna are under control, for example, the IAEA.)

We welcome Mrs. Sylvia Johnigk, a computer scientist, who has been working since long in IT security projects and is now running her own consulting firm based in Munich. She will give us insights in what the Snowden leaks really mean for everybody.

Sylvia Johnigk about INDECT (screenshot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jerN8iSXCc)

Her talk is scheduled for Saturday, 6 June, 2015, 16:00. She will talk in the Track Cyberpeace is more than the absence of cyberwar.

Surveillance is, of course, a topic for other speeches, tracks, and streams. IT security issues are also raised by co-workers of the sba-research, a spin-off from Prof. A Min Tjoa’s  Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems (ISIS) at the TU Vienna. They will present investigations in how ethical problems are treated (or not): Ethics in IT security research.

The Institute of Technology Assessment of the Austrian Academy of Sciences organises three sessions dealing with that context that makes I(C)T(s) instrumental for surveillance – the power context: ICTs and power relations.

There is a Track Emancipation or disempowerment of man with two sessions, another variation of the theme, under the responsibility of the Department of Systems Analysis from the University of Economics Prague.

And there is a whole stream – ICTS 2015 – that endorses a critical perspective on the internet.

The Summit Programme is now accessible through an Overview page. Use the links provided on the Programme site. You can navigate through the programme by clicking on the boxes of the table. You can also download the overview for printing.

The final programme contains 60 lectures or interventions by invited speakers in plenary or parallel sessions, belonging or not to 3 different conferences (conference streams) and 34 self-organised sections (tracks). Currently more than 180 contributions are ready for online publication.

Due to the strong demand for participation we had to change the plans for the room to be used on the opening day that is reserved for plenary sessions only. We switched to the Audimax, the largest room the TU Wien can provide, allowed for 515 persons. The Audimax stretches across two floors in the tower at Getreidemarkt campus of TU Wien, Getreidemarkt 9, 1060 Vienna. The programme will start at 12:00 and last until 19:30.

Audimax

For those invited to the evening reception at 20:00, there is also a change in location (the capacity for appropriate space in the tower would be exceeded). Thus after the last session we will move to the Aula in the Freihaus on the second floor. The Freihaus, Wiedner Hauptstraße 8-10, 1040 Vienna, is the location for all sessions on the following days but Sunday. It is within walking distance (not more than 10 minutes for walking slowly).

Freihaus behind the TU Library on the corner (all photos: TU Wien)

Mind the updated information on page /Venue.

Chantal Mouffe, co-initiator and signatory of the Convivialist Manifesto, was invited to give a talk at the University of Vienna: “The future of democracy: How to face the challenge of the protest movements”.

The Convivialist Manifesto will be presented at our Summit by Marc Humbert and Frank Adloff, which will lay the ground for the discussion of governance on Friday by speeches of Katharine Sarikakis, Zoe Lefkofridi and Uwe Krüger and a panel organised by the Department of Communication of the University of Vienna and will be followed by other discussions on societal alternatives for Europe and the world including stakeholders and members of the civil society.

Mouffe is Professor at the University of Westminster and a political scientist. She emphasises the necessity of social movements not to shy away from politics, if they really intend to have an influence on society. There needs to be a complementation of parliamentary and extra-parliamentray struggles, she says. Otherwise we face the rise of right-wing populism.

Civil society movements and political parties determine the collective intelligence of societies to cope with the crises. Thus they are central for social systems to become sustainable, resilient, anti-fragile. That’s the crossroads information society needs to pass.

An interview with Mouffe in German can be found here.

While the Vienna University of Technology celebrates 200 years of existence, the University of Vienna has its 650 years celebration. And 25 years ago the University of Vienna laid the foundations for the Austrian internet – the so-called ACOnet (Austrian Academic Computer Network).

On that occasion a series of events takes place at the University of Vienna and the MuseumsQuartier. The Summit and net:25 co-operate. We share speakers and discussants. 

The first event is net:future and can be visited by all participants of the Summit. It takes place on the day before the opening day of the Summit: Tuesday, 2nd of June. The event is free, but you need to register. In the evening a live stream of the opera “Salome” from the Wiener Staatsoper is scheduled.

The latest issue of the German edition of the Scientific American “Spektrum der Wissenschaft” published an article from last September (Scientific American Volume 311, Issue 3) about “What makes Humans Different Than Any Other Species”. The article describes the research programme of Michael Tomasello who does empirical research in primates and infants and calls it perhaps the most remarkable approach towards explaining the unique cognitive capabilities of humans. Tomasello, an American psychologist, is since 1998 Director at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. (After the image of man propagated by the Nazi regime it is the policy of the Institute founded in 1997 not to elect Germans for leading positions, the article says.)

(photo: Jacobs Foundation)

The idea is that it is co-operativity that makes the difference. Evolutionary pressure unfolded a ratchet effect that yielded ever higher complex co-operation. Thus children show a higher degree of social intelligence than adult chimpanzees or orang-utans. (See here.)

Interestingly, that position is not foiled by primatologist Frans de Waal. Though stressing the evolutionary basis of co-operativity in primates (and mammals) he sides Tomasello’s position in that only humans are able to build groups that can accomplish seemingly impossibles. However, he contends that the unique feature of humans who are ready to co-operate with anonymous fellows can be explained by the application of properties to a bigger frame so as to make the properties gain an additional function.

That’s a good idea. Given the increase of confrontations and intransigence at all levels of the social build-up today, within societies but also between societies, we would need to be enabled to apply our evolutionary advantage up to the level of humanity’s world society. So that’s an important subject to deal with at our Summit.

We will tackle the theme of co-operation in the discussion of conviviality as a philosophical and sociological solution to the problems that have arisen. Marc Humbert and Frank Adloff will present that topic. Manuel Bohn, belonging to Tomasello’s group, will give us new insights in ontogenetic capabilities of humans. And Günther Witzany will prove that co-operation started already long before mammals. Their speeches are scheduled for Thursday, 4th of June, in the morning.

Also the article written by de Waal can be found in German in the same issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft. (See here.)

Eduardo Reck Miranda is a composer who makes use of the computer when composing. That is, he uses algorithmic tools in the composition process. So he resorts to Conway’s Game of Life cellular automata model to generate music.

Does this mean that such kind of music is losing its artistic feature since it is not born in a creative act but follows dull deterministic rules? And can that kind of music only be “understood” by those who understand the deterministic rules? No, says Miranda: “I hope it can communicate beautiful thoughts to everyone :-)”

A sample of his music will be made available to us during the concert evening on the 4th of June. The piece “Grain Streams”, for piano and electronics, will be performed and the computer will be operated by Miranda himself. Listen to the first movement here.

Miranda composed not only piano music but also choral and orchestral work that is delightful. He let human brain data play a role in the performances and we can wonder whether even slime molds are delighted when he tries to communicate with them through piano music and transforms their responses into piano music too.

The concert is part of the Summit Track “Music, information and symmetry” organised by the Moscow P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory in co-operation with the International Symmetry Association (ISA).

When Sergey Petoukhov from the ISA explains what the track is about he makes clear the track does not stop at amoeba:

“One interesting topic is the relation between numeric ratios of musical harmony and parametric ensembles of elements of molecular-genetic systems. This scientific theme is intensively studied in Moscow State Conservatory to understand the genetic basis of feeling of musical harmony; its results lead to «genetic» musical scales and corresponding genetic music for musical creativity and for musical therapy.”

The track brings together “musicians, musicologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, biologists and other specialists”. They will not only “develop theoretical and practical tasks in the field of musical culture using achievements of information sciences and the theory of symmetry” but also discuss the role of “contemporary music as reflection to the dangers and hopes of our times, and how we can influence social progress by means of music”.

– Is contemporary music of the 21st century in need of leaving behind the 20th century with its overarching tendency towards the dissolution of what was deemed classical music? Isn’t that tendency a rather shallow playing around devoid of more fundamental ambitions? And is the re-collection of self-organisation in genes, organisms and neurons the way to get back to the core? Let’s listen.

Invited Speaker Günther Witzany‘s new publication: “DNA Habitats and Their RNA Inhabitants”. The Proceedings of an outstanding symposium. Documents a fundamental new understanding of genetic novelty, code-generating, genome-formatting factors, multi-use nature for RNAgents and behavioral motifs of RNA-consortia. An issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, edited by Günther Witzany that April.

Click on the picture to get more information. See also here.

Two months before the Summit we count more than 250 registered participants from all continents (a number that is yet to increase; among others, not all invited speakers have registered by now etc.).

So far the participants come from

• Africa: Algeria and South Africa;
• Asia: People’s Republic of China, Iran, Israel, Japan, Nepal, Pakistan, Taiwan and Turkey;
• Europe: the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, UK), from Norway, Russian Federation, Serbia and Switzerland;
• Americas: Canada, Mexico and USA; Argentina, Brazil and Colombia;
• Oceania: Australia and New Zealand.

Meanwhile more than 80 contributions have been uploaded for publication, about another 200 accepted abstracts and abstracts in revision are waiting for formatted upload (we had 50 rejections and by now more than 50 withdrawals).

The programme is still in the making. New highlights can be expected. 49 Invited Speakers, 1 stream and 12 tracks are already announced. Keep track here!

We look forward to an exciting deliberation on key issues of the future information society.

*) Of course, you are still welcome to register (also without a presentation). Reduced fees are available for certain groups as before. Look at our fees table.

As of today the conference system accepts word files too. Please, upload a pdf and a word version as well. The pdf version is used for the review process.