FIS does, in our context, not mean the Fédération Internationale de Ski. It signifies the oldest international community in our field – in the field of foundations of information science. FIS is the backbone of our Summit and is together with other groups (already introduced here: ICTS network, ICPI, and DTMD) co-initiator of the Summit.

The founding father of FIS is Pedro C. Marijuán from Zaragoza, Spain, together with Michael Conrad (1941-2000) from the US.

Pedro C. Marijuán (photo: Pedro C. Marijuán)

Marijuán tells us about FIS:

“The FIS initiative (Foundations of Information Science), started in early 90s, has been attempting a new, fundamental disciplinary development around the information concept –Information Science. Scholars and scientists from very different fields have converged onto this collective long-term enterprise, which has matured in a series of successful conferences, numerous scholarly publications, and a vast accumulation of electronic exchanges in a high-quality discussion list during all these years. At FIS, rather than the discussion of a single particularized concept, information becomes the intellectual adventure of developing a ‘vertical’ or ‘transdisciplinary’ science connecting the different threads and scales of informational processes, which demands both a unifying and a multi-perspective approach. In our times, information represents a crucial discussion theme in many arenas (from quantum processing, to biological organization, nervous systems, knowledge society, global sustainability). The advancement of information science appears as a plural and open enterprise – whereby the intellectual capital amassed at FIS has to be shared and joined with other multidisciplinary efforts and organizational enterprises. In this regard, the FIS discussion list has been an essential instrument to promote multidisciplinary exchanges and to keep alive the Foundations of Information Science initiative.”

Here are the links:

http://fis.sciforum.net/ (the new fis website)
https://www.mail-archive.com/fis@listas.unizar.es/ (the fis list archives)
http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/ (the fis list)

You can submit! Just click on the “submit” link in every open call for papers.

And you can already register.

Read the details on our submission and fees sites.

(photo: John Collier)

John Collier, expert in complex systems and information theories, when Visiting Scholar at the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS) in Vienna only recently, made up his mind on the red thread of his keynote speech at the Summit.

Collier will carry us on a tour d’horizon from natural evolution to the constitution of values and a valuable future of information society.

Starting off with information accounts in a dynamical perspective, Collier will tell us which principles apply across evolutionary levels (like Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s isomorphies). He will focus on the application of those principles to social systems and end up with a view on the political organisation of society.

Here he finds an opposition of two management styles:

• either you have an entrainment of the elements of the social system by a rather deterministic top-down control, which involves high costs for the system to be maintained (in prehuman systems this is the waste of thermodynamical or chemical energy);
• or you have an entrainment by facilitation.

The latter style is the one that needs to be preferred and prioritised. It includes giving an equal chance for everybody to realise herself in a rather self-determined way without enabling them to dominate others. Here you have the rational core of the ideal of anarchy, Collier says. In his terms, it seems not an individualistic approach. It’s rather unity through diversity – another reminiscence of Bertalanffy. Exaggerated individualism would make the system fall apart.

What regards the implementation of such a system, Collier is very clear: you learn from the experience of the latest new social movements like the OccupyX that social change is not achievable when doing without any leadership.

See Collier’s huge variety of papers.

The topic of ethics of robots attracts extended interest on our Summit.

Renowned critic of Artificial Intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus, published in 1972 the book “What computers can’t do”, followed up in 1992 by the book “What computers still can’t do”.

At the Summit, Tom Ziemke from the University of Skövde in Sweden will paraphrase those titles. His talk will rather focus on “What robots can’t do either”. Notwithstanding, Ziemke is convinced that there is much that robots can really do (even more than computers). So he works as co-ordinator in an EU-funded research project on robot-assisted therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders, with the acronym DREAM.

“Probo”, a robot they develop (DREAM)

Peter Purgathofer from the Vienna University of Technology – working on the interplay of design and (software) development in the Human-Computer Interaction Group – is concerned about dreams engineers might have concerning AI in contradistinction to nightmares movie audiences are concerned with. He will give another talk to lay bridges between different communities and elaborate on hard-to-see problems in social robots.

And Rafael Capurro (already introduced here) is the third to take the floor.

These three talks will be complemented by a podium discussion. Moderator will be Marco Ragni from the Center for Cognitive Science at the Institute of Computer Science and Social Research, University of Freiburg. Ragni has a venia in computer science.

Marco Ragni

Among additional participants in the round table are Søren Brier from the Copenhagen Business School, Editor-in-Chief of Cybernetics and Human Knowing, and Martin Rhonheimer, who started his academic career as assistant of Hermann Lübbe at Zurich and is currently Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome. 

Thanks goes to Katholische Hochschulgemeinde that co-sponsors that event as well as the Capurro-Fiek Foundation.

See programme.

The ICTs-and-Society Network has published its 2015 call: ICTS 2015. The Summit is also the ICTS 2015 (besides FIS 2015, ICPI 2015 and DTMD 2015).

(source http://icts-and-society.net/events/5th-icts-and-society-conference/)

It’s all about the commons – the Internet as a commons. The call for papers lists more than 20 sub-topics. The main questions are: “What are the main challenges that the Internet and social media are facing in capitalism today? What potentials for an alternative, commonist Internet are there? What are existing hindrances for such an Internet? What is the relationship of power structures, protest movements, societal developments, struggles, radical reforms, etc. to the Internet? How can critical political economy and critical theory best study the Internet and social media today?”

(source http://icts-and-society.net/events/5th-icts-and-society-conference/)

Søren Brier, Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, published in 2008 the book “Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough” (now available as paperback). The main argument is that meaning cannot be covered by accounts that reduce information to a technological or natural science perspective. Hence the necessity for Brier to resort to Semiotics (see for reviews here).

However, Joseph Brenner, affiliated with the International Center for Transdisciplinary Research (CIRET) in Paris, contends “that some underlying metaphysical assumptions of semiotics conflict with the properties of information as a physical as well as epistemological process embedded in a physical world”. So he organises a round table at our Summit “to examine some of the critical conditions for a semiotic view of information and contrast it with other philosophical views of information, which, in contrast to Semiotics, are more directly grounded in science”.

Brenner sees three possible positions on the relation between Semiotics and Information Science:

• Parallel: Mutual distrust or disregard: to the extent that some semioticians do not directly refer to the most recent concepts of information, they may be missing valuable insights for the applications, as well as limitations of Semiotics
• Orthogonal: Touching at one point: if two theories are orthogonal, this implies that at least they intersect at one point, or on one point, even if it is the one from which they diverge. If this is the more accurate model, what is this point?
• Interactive: Cooperative: each approach accepts and informs the other, giving sense and an expressed preferred domain of operation for non-semiotic vs. semiotic principles

Clearly, his sympathy is with the third possibility. And, at the same time, for Brenner a possibility is favoured that “would avoid reduction to a doctrine that excludes meaning, esthetics and ethics”.

As a result, the round table will try to go beyond a confrontation of Semiotics and Information Science and take other approaches into account.

The round table will be populated besides Brier by John Collier, Pedro C. Marijuán and Wolfgang Hofkirchner. It will be part of the FIS 2015 and the ICPI 2015 Conference Streams as well.

Go there.

Until 17 November 2014, the call to groups for participation brought a return of 45 proposals for special tracks. (And still there are proposals coming in.) So the programme takes shape!

About half of them involve calls for papers. Others suggest tracks with invited people like round tables, podiums, workshops etc.

Each proposal is now carefully checked. Calls for Papers are put online one by one, once possible modifications are accorded and details fixed (go to calls for papers). – The deadline for abstract submissions is 27 February 2015. If you like to submit, you have 3 months time to do so (go to submission).

The other Tracks are published as part of the programme as soon as they are ready for publication (go to programme).

Besides, also two Conference Streams have already published their Call for Papers (go to calls for papers).

We chartered a ship for the whole last day of the Summit: the Summit will be continued on board. The ship is MS Admiral Tegetthoff from the DDSG and has room for plenary and parallel sessions as well. The floating conference on the Danube will be a perfect way to end our Summit: in a relaxed atmosphere, while the scenery of Lower Austria, in particular, the Wachau, is passing slowly, to deliberate upon conclusions we can draw for the practices of scientists, engineers, artists, business women, political representatives, members of civil society. As we will have a lecture on the earliest modern humans in Europe that lived in that valley side by side with Neanderthals, our Summit spans a wide range when discussing the future of the so-called information society.

MS Admiral Tegetthoff (photo: DDSG)

No extra fee is planned for the floating conference. It is included in every fee. (The fee structure is already online.)

The social dinner is scheduled for the return trip in the evening.

For details see the venue and the schedule.

So far we have four conference streams. One was already introduced here (The Difference that Makes a Difference – go to Call for Papers). Further conference streams are the following two.

In 2008, when acting as Professor for Internet and Society at the University of Salzburg, Austria, Wolfgang Hofkirchner – together with his then Assistant Professor Christian Fuchs who had successfully finalised his next step of academic career (habilitation for the venia docendi in Information and Communication Technologies & Society) – organised the kickoff meeting of an ICTs-and-Society Network. Manuel Castells sent Eduard Aibar Puentes as representative of the IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona). Among others, Gustavo Cardoso, Alice Robbin, Karine Barzilai-Nahon, Leah Lievrouw, Niels Ole Finnemann, Brian D. Loader, Ben Anderson, Michel Menou, Peng Hwa Ang, Chengyu Xiong were invited. The idea was and has been since to install a platform for interdisciplinary discourse and self-reflection of an emerging discipline.

Several meetings followed, one at the IN3, Spain, in 2010, another at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2012. Christian Fuchs co-ordinates the next conference as conference stream at our Summit. The topic they bring in is, above all, political economy of digital media.

Go to Call for Papers.

For reflection of disciplines, it is worth resorting to philosophy. Philosophy of information, including information ethics, is helpful to orient empirical research and technological development as well as development of social innovation. And it is needful, given the global challenges of our time.

So it does not come as a surprise that philosophers of information are scattered globally, embedded in different cultural settings, and representing different scientific approaches. Rafael Capurro and Luciano Floridi are the first when it comes to Europe (though Capurro has Latin-American origins); Russia finds its first information philosopher with Arkadiy Dmitriyevich Ursul (whose philosophical study of information was published in German language in the German Democratic Republic in 1970); in Japan, Tamito Joshida, Member of the Japan Academy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo and the Chuo University, Vice-President of the Science Council of Japan, combined philosophy of science considerations with semiotics and introduced the idea of an “informatic turn” as a second scientific revolution (an idea dating back to the late 1960s, but for the first time presented to an international public in English in 2005 only – see here); and China’s first philosopher of information is Kun Wu (who established that field in China about 30 years ago).

Kun Wu founded the International Centre for Philosophy of Information at his Xi’an Jiaotong University only recently with scholars like Luciano Floridi, Anthony Beavers from University of Evansville, Indiana, and Colin Allen from Indiana University Bloomington. They held the first international conference on philosophy of information last year in Xi’an (see here). This time they focus on the relationship between philosophy and disciplines.

Go to Call for Papers.

Innovations are emergent processes. Though they are emergent and can’t thus be fully controlled, we are part of the game and have an influence on them. How can we facilitate the emergence of innovations that are needful and impact our societies in the right direction?

According to German philosopher Ernst Bloch the possible future shines forth in the here and now as islands of real possibilities (that was his idea of concrete utopia). Some of those possibilities might be taken up, while others might not. Markus Peschl creeps into that question. He has been researching on how we can enable spaces for possibilities to be taken up. In this process, the final cause comes in: we have to think from the possible future in order to identify those possibilities that are not only anchored in current reality but are also wishful.

Markus F. Peschl is professor for Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Science at the University of Vienna. His focus of research is on the question of knowledge (creation/innovation, construction, and representation) in various contexts. Currently he is working in the field of radical innovation where he developed the concepts of Emergent Innovation and Enabling Spaces that have been applied successfully in several industry projects. M. Peschl has published 6 books and more than 130 papers in international journals and collections.

He will give a talk on sustainable innovations. For further information see here.