Francis Heylighen agreed to be Speaker at the Summit. Being famous for having created the Principia Cybernetica Web, a genuine body of knowledge about complexity, he is the Director of the Global Brain Institute that was founded in 2012 at his university (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). See here a short description of the GBI.

Resuming research in collective intelligence, Heylighen deals with the role of the Web. Read, e.g., his paper on the so-called singularity.

He adds to the list of 10 Speakers already confirmed. See here.

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

“hello world!” is the default form of address the blog software at hand is suggesting to me. at first glance, my reaction would be to refuse that term and delete it. won’t it tempt me to become presumptuous? shouldn’t i better be more humble and aware of critiques that my post would add to an endless flood of information (meaningless or meaningful) just because of my personal demand for attention?

given, what i want to call for here, however, i feel rather inclined to leave it as it is (though with a certain sense of irony). – anyway, the upcoming summit intends

• to focus on the state of the world (we have a choice between a possible breakdown and a needed breakthrough)
• to gather as many concerned world-wide as we can and, eventually,
• to form a “coalition of the willing” (sorry for that plagiarism – another irony) to contribute to a change (to the worldwide fulfilment of a sustainable information society).

of course, that is ambitious and demanding but – i hope you will agree – it is not pretentious and not a sectarian claim.

pls, have a look at the call for participation. judge by yourself. i hope to be able to welcome you to our initiative.

-wolfgang hofkirchner-