Many abstracts have already been accepted, some are still under review. The deadline for notification is approaching – one more week.

If your abstract is accepted, you can proceed to the second step of submission. Download the template and bring your extended abstract in good shape for online publication! You need to submit that file (on the sciforum platform called “manuscript”) in a word version in order to receive your DOI.

Currently the system is made for uploading manuscripts in pdf version only. So, pls, don’t worry, just wait. We will notify you once the system has been updated.

Dr. Reinhold Mitterlehner has committed his patronage for the Summit. Mitterlehner is not only Federal Minister for Science, Research and Economy, but also Vice Chancellor of Austria.

In the middle Dr. Mitterlehner visiting the Intertool 2014 (photo: Christian Husar)

A representative of his shall be designated to deliver a message at the opening ceremony of the Summit.

Apart from the currently 36 invited speeches (a number that will yet increase), 232 submissions by a total of 306 authors have been received by the deadline for open calls. 94 from 232 have already been accepted, the remaining submissions are still under review. The notification is due within three weeks.

After acceptance, authors are invited to resubmit their abstract according to the template available at sciforum. When having registered with the Summit, the abstract will get a DOI and be published online.

Early Bird fees expire in the beginning of April.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dirk Helbing from the ETH Zürich – who was the main initiator of FuturICT, a Future Emerging Technologies EU research programme flagship application which, unfortunately, failed in the competition against the Human Brain project and the Graphene project (see a comment here) – will give a talk.

The Internet of Things can become a “Planetary Nervous System“, Helbing is convinced. That Planetary Nervous System, however, shall not become a Big Data platform for Big Brothers but rather be “built by citizens and for citizens”, a “Citizen Web“, “open, privacy-preserving and participatory”. Helbing envisions a “novel social mining paradigm”: “Users are provided with freedom and incentives to share, collect and, at the same time, protect data of their digital environment in real-time.”

Summit attendees will be curious about how that can work.

They can listen to Helbing’s keynote on the 5th of June in the framework of the “Global Brain” Track.

(photos: the Global Brain Institute)

See the TEDx video with Helbing’s talk on Creating a planetary nervous system together.

Learn more about Dirk Helbings publications here.

Keynote Speaker Luciano Floridi’s most recent edited book is downloadable as Springer Open ebook for free and also purchasable in print version.

This book “is actually a synthesis of the research done in 2012 and the feedback received in 2013”, Floridi says in the introduction. The manifesto itself, released in 2013, was the outcome of the work of a group of scholars, organised by EU DG Connect and chaired by Floridi.

The message of the manifesto (that is only some pages long):

“ICTs are not mere tools but rather environmental forces that are increasingly affecting:
1. our self-conception (who we are);
2. our mutual interactions (how we socialise);
3. our conception of reality (our metaphysics); and
4. our interactions with reality (our agency)”
“due to at least four major transformations:
a. the blurring of the distinction between reality and virtuality;
b. the blurring of the distinction between human, machine and nature;
c. the reversal from information scarcity to information abundance; and
d. the shift from the primacy of stand-alone things, properties, and binary relations, to the primacy of interactions, processes and networks” (bold by WH).

The book sections that substantiate the manifesto are about hyperconnectivity; identity, selfhood and attention; complexity, responsibility and governance; and the public sphere in a computational era.

All of them are topics we will touch at the Summit in different streams and tracks and, for sure, from different points of view.

Yes, there is. Though findings from what classically was termed ethology and now has differentiated into, and been complemented by, specialised fields like biocognition or social cognition have been revealing an ever increasing number of similarities (e.g., have a look at the “Raven Politics” START project led by Thomas Bugnyar at the University of Vienna – they could not contribute to the Summit, since they are occupied by events celebrating the University of Vienna’s 650th anniversary at exactly the same time), there is a fundamental dissimilarity too. This dissimilarity has to do with the kind of co-operation humans are practicing in contradistinction to the behaviour of nonhuman species.

That position is substantiated by evidence found in long years of research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, directed by Michael Tomasello. Tomasello is well-known for his publications on cognition, communication and co-operation. In his most recent book “A Natural History of Human Thinking” published winter last year he sums up the research programme carried out at his Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology. Tomasello contends the so-called “shared intentionality” hypothesis which provides an evolutionary and structural explanation of the difference of human co-operativity that yields, and presupposes, different human communicative and, as a consequence, different human cognitive capabilities as well (a hypothesis, by the way, that is in full concordance with the Triple-C Model of Wolfgang Hofkirchner’s Unified Theory of Information framework). Evidence comes from studies in Great Apes and children.

(photos: EVA)

We are glad to welcome early stage researcher and co-worker of Tomasello, Manuel Bohn. Bohn’s research is concerned with the ontogenetic and evolutionary origins of uniquely human communication.

“I’m particularly interested in the role of shared knowledge and experience as a basis of communication”, he says. “By studying great apes and human infants I hope to shed light on the similarities and differences in the cognitive and motivational architecture underlying their gestural communication.”

Bohn co-authors papers with Tomasello and Josep Call to be published soon on iconic gestures and communication about absent entities in great apes and children.

We are keen on listening to first results and learning how human co-operativity is shaping human communication.

This talk will build a bridge toward the one by Günther Witzany who extends the idea of co-operation to the whole biotic realm and to the ones by Marc Humbert and Frank Adloff as well who are concerned with co-operation in today’s societies.

Here you find Bohn’s cv.

German political scientist Jörg Becker characterises our society as “control society”. In doing so, he resumes, among others, the postmodern thread from Foucauldian industrial “disciplinary society” (with the panopticum as metaphor) to Deleuze and Guattari’s version of information society as “control society” in which individuals have internalised what otherwise would have caused punishment.

Becker says: “In the past, control was material, brute and violent. Today, control is besides and in addition smooth. There is a permanent anticipated inner willingness to accept control as beautiful, harmless and as a matter of course.”

If we break this statement down to surveillance, the crux seems to be that punishment is not yet ruled out: what is the rationale for ubiquitous surveillance? Isn’t it punishing of those who would not abide? Isn’t materiality, brutalness and violence in social relationships still the ultima ratio?

We will have time to discuss with Becker on 4 June 2015.

Becker is known for his publications on media and war. Below you see his most recent book. It will be issued that summer.

Austrian computer scientist Christiane Floyd, appointed honorary professor at the Summit’s host institution (“Honorarprofessorin der TU Wien”) where she teaches Philosophy of Science at the Vienna PhD School of Informatics – famous for her STEPS method for participative design and evolutionary prototyping of software and, by the way, the first female professor in informatics in German speaking countries – is one of the founders of the German association Forum Computer Professionals for Peace and Social Responsibility (FIfF) in the 80s. We are very happy to welcome FIfF to our Summit.

Currently they campaign for “cyberpeace“, which is more than the absence of cyberwar. The Track they call for is exactly about that. It is scheduled for Saturday, 6 June 2015. It will tie in with the Expert Discussion with Bishop Michael Bünker on “Just war” and to the talk of Mariarosaria Taddeo and her Track on Informational warfare.

Another call is for artistic works, not for papers. Giovanna Di Rosario, Adjunct Director of the Literary Studies and Digital Technologies Research Group Hermeneia at the Universitat de Barcelona, calls for pieces of e-literature created by artists. The planned exhibition of artworks is co-curated by Kristóf Fenvesy who is one of two moderators of a Track on future education. The artistic works shall relate to that topic. The deadline for submitting those pieces is after the deadline for paper submissions.

Two decades ago a high level expert group (HLEG) was formed at the EU. Chairman was Luc Soete. Among the members was Manuel Castells (who had to decline the invitation to our Summit). The task was to write a report on the social aspects of the information society. In 1997 the report was ready. The title was: “Building the European information society for us all“. On page 16 they wrote:

Did we make any advances since? Isn’t that message as topical as it was when published? Don’t we face technological rationality along with social irrationalities that are the causes for war, terrorism, surveillance, racism, and so on – just in our time?

Gunilla Bradley, Professor Emerita of Informatics at the Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology, takes up the notion of “wisdom” and elaborates on the prerequisites of a “wise society“. She is just finalising her new book “Towards Wisdom in the ICT society“. Co-author is Diane Whitehouse, chair of IFIP’s (International Federation for Information Systems) ICT and Society technical committee (TC 9).

Gunilla Bradley will talk to us on 4 June 2015. By doing so, she addresses the core concern of our Summit.

The core concern of our Summit is to deliberate on how to enable our societies to reorganise themselves so as to master the global challenges and follow a sustainable path of development through proper cognitive, communicative and co-operative activities (which all are information processes) supported by ICTs.

In terms of wisdom and being wise, the core concern can be framed as follows: An information society, a communication society, a knowledge society, needs to be a wise society. Gunilla Bradley says, “the ICT society should serve the human needs. And what we are in urgent need of today is just living together in harmony and peace without focusing exclusively on our own selves. That’s actually wisdom. Structures, human development, and dialogue are golden keys for action.”

Gunilla Bradley’s talk will perfectly well connect with the sociological discussion of conviviality on the same day.

When discussing the future of information society, we will discuss at the same time about society at a more general level. We will refer to shortcomings or malfunctions of current societal developments and to what sociologists call mechanisms that might help society overcome the state of affairs.

The session “How do we want to live and how do we get there?” will directly address these questions.

It will start with the Manifeste convivialiste, a Déclaration d’interdépendance.

Convivialism is a term going back to Ivan Illich‘s 1973 book “Tools for Conviviality”. Born in Vienna in 1923, he stayed much of his life time in Latin America, which made him take the perspective of the so-called Third World. Western values should not be imposed. He was a priest with unorthodox views, an alternative pedagogue and a critical philosopher of technology. Technology should be made into tools that help humans flourish rather than make them slaves of machines.

French economist Marc Humbert organised in 2010 a conference in Tokyo to start revisiting Illich. About 40 French intellectuals, coming from different backgrounds, held a discussion for years and agreed to publish that manifesto. It’s a plea for a dynamic balance between individualism and collectivism, for the right of the individual to compete with others as long as it is not detrimental to the collective. That’s the essence of convivialism.

Among the authors of the Manifeste is Edgar Morin, philosopher and sociologist, who authored the book “La Voie – Pour l’avenir de l’humanité” and published together with Stéphane Hessel, the author of “Indignez-vous!”. In 2012 Morin visited Austria to receive the first Ludwig von Bertalanffy Award for Complexity Thinking from the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science.

Another author is Chantal Mouffe who published with Ernesto Laclau. She is famous for her idea of agonistic pluralism – an idea the spirit of which you can find in the text of the Manifeste.

Sociologist Frank Adloff is co-editor of the German edition. Both Humbert and Adloff will present at our Summit alternative visions of society.

The session will take place on 4 June 2015.

To read the manifesto go to the track description.