Philosopher of Information, Luciano Floridi, known for his recent books “The Fourth Revolution – How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality” (2014), “The Ethics of Information” (2013), and “The Philosophy of Information” (2011), now Director of Research at the OII, the Oxford Internet Institute, one of the top research centers on new media, fixed his keynote: “The Politics of Uncertainty”.

For Floridi, uncertainty is not ignorance. Uncertainty about the answer to a question is an essential ingredient of democratic societies, he will argue. Information society must not be a dogmatic society. Doubts must be able to raise. Have a glimpse at his Guardian op-ed from 1st of September, 2014.

– A reminiscence of Sir Karl Raimund Popper’s “open society”? Or an elaboration of it? Or a tribute to postmodernity? After listening, some will know, some will be uncertain…

Floridi’s keynote will be scheduled for Thursday, 4th of June, 2015.

Tobacco mosaic virus (RNA virus). Image copyright Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc.

Besides articles, independent Austrian philosopher Günther Witzany has published a lot of books on biocommunication. He is listed in the network of James Shapiro on the third way of evolution, because he denies a mechanistic, deterministic interpretation of evolution and information and an idealistic view like the intelligent design stance as well. Opposite to both perspectives, Witzany departed in the 80s from Habermasian ideas of communication and has been identifying since the agents that generate biological information. They interact by mediation of signs, which has a syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspect.

He also organised scientific meetings. In 2006, he was, with Wolfgang Hofkirchner, co-organiser of the 6th Gathering in Biosemiotics. His most recent meeting was a symposium on “DNA habitats and its RNA inhabitants” of that year.

Günther Witzany will present his new concept for the emergence of biological information: Biocommunication and Natural Genome Editing.

By doing so, he will contribute to the search for a concept of information that crosses borders from RNA to human societies.

Austrian is official carrier of our Summit. Also the well-known redtickets (which are the lowest fare of Austrian) are discounted for flights to Vienna from 27th of May, 2015, and from Vienna until 14th of June, 2015. So you can easily choose to stay for a longer period.

You can book already now! Of course, it is advisable to compare with other airlines.

Due to the date of the Summit – Thursday is holiday, which makes the weekend long – rooms will be scarce. Tourists will populate Vienna. And maybe you want to come with your partner too! So it’s better you take care for your stay asap! The longer you wait, the higher the prices you get.

Apart from the search engines, you can check the list of offers we collect. Go to Accommodations.

Don’t miss the opening of the Summit on Wednesday. And count in a late end of the Summit on Sunday eve. So if you want to enjoy Vienna, reserve some extra days before and/or after the Summit. (According to annual surveys of the international consulting firm Mercer, Vienna is for the fifth time in a row the world’s Most Livable City.)

Terry Deacon (selfie)

Terrence Deacon is Speaker at the Summit. After the “Symbolic Species” he published in 2012 an impactful 600 pages book – “Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter” – in which he, as a (natural) scientist, applies, and finds new, insights in complex systems as a tool for interpreting facts that we know about the self-organisation of matter from physical entities via life up to the human mind. Several terms appear in that book you might be unfamiliar with like “absentials”, “ententionality”, “teleodynamics”. Read a review here. See his cv here.

Terry Deacon will speak about: How information lost its meaning (and how to recover it).

Bob Logan

Afterwards, Robert K. Logan will hold a conversation with him. Bob Logan had worked with Marshall McLuhan, has written books on the emergence of language, human mind, culture, the internet, and his most recent book project is “What is Information?” in which he fleshes out an idea he first published in an article in collaboration with Stuart Kauffman: information in biosystems is not what Shannon talked about but propagation of organisation. The core concept here is that of constraints. See his cv here.

So we can look forward to an in-depth discussion of basic concepts relevant for grasping what is called information. Keynote and discussion will be scheduled for the first day.

Bob Logan will also have a talk on his own later on. He just fixed the title: The Applications of Teleodynamics to Social Systems.

He says about his talk: “I attempt to extend Terry Deacon’s notion of teleodynamics to culture, language, organization, science, economics and technology (CLOSET). This is a highly speculative unauthorized extension of Deacon’s idea which I present as a probe ala Marshall McLuhan by which I mean it is a way to examine some interesting questions of the way the members of CLOSET set seem to act in their own self-interest.”

This dictum ascribed to a quote from cybernetician and systems thinker Gregory Bateson denotes a series of interdisciplinary workshops organised by David Chapman and Magnus Ramage. Both belong to the Department for Computing and Communication of The Open University in UK.

Chapman and Ramage

They started the series in 2011 with a workshop on information and technology and continued in 2013 with a workshop on information: space, time and identity.

2015 they will join our Summit and organise their third workshop as Conference Stream. The new topic is: information, ethics,  spirituality and religion. A call for papers will be released.

DTMD 2015 is by now the fourth conference that will be held as Summit Conference Stream.

The other streams are:

• Foundations of Information Science
• ICTs and Society
• Philosophy of Information

Geraldine Fitzpatrick is a Speaker representative of the host faculty (Fakultät für Informatik der TU Wien). It’s now the fifth year, that Geraldine Fitzpatrick completed in her new function: head of the so-called Institute of Design and Assessment of Technology. Name and foundation of that institute go back to wishes of the students that demonstrated in the 80s for better education at the Vienna University of Technology. Ina Wagner and Peter Fleissner were the first professors at that institute. They headed two different working groups: Wagner was Professor of Multidisciplinary Systems Design and CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work); Fleissner’s group was in the beginning called Sociocybernetics, later HCI (Human Computer Interaction).

Now the Institute is made up of 3 workgroups:

the Multidisciplinary Design Group;

HCI;

and the Centre for Applied Assistive Technologies that joined the institute 3 years ago.

Fitzpatrick is the head of the HCI working group.

She will speak about the design of socially embedded systems.

Aside from Szpankowski, the other two Speakers whose keynote titles have been clarified are Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski and Rafael Capurro.

Fuchs-Kittowski is retired computer scientist and has since ever been engaged with questions of information and society. In particular, he is as radical a critic of the militarisation of informatics as Joseph Weizenbaum was. This year Fuchs-Kittowski attended already two international conferences on banishing war robots, drones and their possible nuclear armament. He will give a panorama “From the Automated Chess Game to the Soccer Game to the Battlefield” and conclude that attempts to teach war robots ethics are doomed to failure.

Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski

That teaching robots ethics is rather an error in categories is what philosopher Capurro will argue. He will refer back to Aristotle’s concepts of “agents” and “patients”. His conclusion will be that Ethics of Robots can only be understood as objective genitive not as subjective genitive. See his paper here.

Rafael Capurro

You can shape the design of the Summit. In the current phase of the preparation we offer your group or organisation the possibility to step in. You can present yourself, organise paper sessions, workshops, panels or even a conference stream or whatever you would like to suggest. We are looking forward to your proposal. Go to the Call for participation.

Three Speakers have fixed the topics of their contribution. One is Wojciech Szpankowski, Professor of Computer Sciences at Purdue University. He is Director of one of the Science and Technology Centers that are funded by the US National Science Foundation – the Center for Science of Information, constituted by the best US universities like Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, San Diego and others besides Purdue.

Their mission is “to advance science and technology through a new quantitative understanding of the representation, communication, and processing of information in biological, physical, social, and engineered systems”.

That’s the figure they provide to show the intersection of Science of Information with other disciplines.

In particular, they have three application thrusts:

• one for Life Sciences;
• one for Communication;
• and one for Knowledge.

The Center is the most advanced research effort related to technologies of and for the information society. Szpankowski will present the challenges of their cutting-edge research. We are looking forward to put their ambitions in the perspective of making the information society a better place on earth.