BCSSS Fellow Felix Tretter who organised the “homo informaticus” track on the last Summit is to give the introductory talk at the Akademie für Politik und Zeitgeschehen of the Bavarian Hanns Seidel Stiftung. The experts talks on 15 March 2016 are held under the same label. They address the Janus-faced Information and Communication Technologies of our time and the need to design them ethically.

Summit participant Sarah Spiekermann, Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), chair of the Institute for Management Information Systems, will give a talk related to “Value Based IT Design”. She is author of the book “Ethical IT Innovation: A Value-based System Design Approach”.

The talks are in German. Here you find the programme.

The ISIS Special Interest Group “Emergent Systems, Information and Society” will have its second meeting in the framework of the BCSSS emcsr avantgarde. The international group which is a joint group together with the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science and the Leibniz Sozietät der Wissenschaften will organise a satellite workshop on “Systems of Systems”.

“Systems of Systems” is a research area in which loosely-coupled heterogeneous systems and their emergent behaviour are studied. The concept is applied in several fields like the military sector, systems engineering, or organisational learning. The aim of the half-day workshop is to critically discuss the theoretical foundations of the concept and to analyse implications it might have for different fields of application.

The second meeting is sponsored by the Bertalanffy Center (the first one was sponsored by the Leibniz Sozietät). Participants of the emcsr avantgarde may take part also in that workshop. Further details will be published on the emcsr avantgarde website.

If you are interested in the work of the SIG and want to contribute, just drop a line to Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Hans-Jörg Kreowski or Rainer Zimmermann.

The International Society for Information Studies is Co-Organiser of the emcsr avantgarde 2016 in Vienna.

This event focuses primarily on the promotion of young scientists. The broad field of information studies is included in the list of possible topics. The Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science launches a contest for the Ludwig von Bertalanffy Young Scientist Award in the framework of the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (emcsr) held every 2 years in Vienna.

• You can become nominee by submitting an abstract that is accepted.
• You can volunteer for the jury.
• You can submit a suggestion for a satellite workshop.

The overall theme is “FutureVision?! Which life do we want?”.

The deadline for submissions is 19 February 2016.

Look at emcsr.net.

Gunilla Bradley from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm has prepared her Summit 2015 keynote for the interested public.

“What is it all about?”, you might ask with her. Her answer is: “Our responsibility for the next generation and the planet...”

She develops a vision of the good ICT society. And she is optimistic that there is an opportunity to build such a good and sustainable society, though currently the West is rather concerned with terrorism, refugees, economic crises, etc.

Take a glimpse at part of her convergence model. The sketch is part of her analysis of global trends.

Download the full text here.

Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin: Mathilde-Jacob-Platz

The Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin e.V. (LS) invites the group “Emergent Systems, Information and Society” to present itself at a one-day colloquium of their two classes (Natur- und Technikwissenschaften; Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften). That group was founded at the Summit 2015 as joint endeavour of the Arbeitskreis of the LS, the Research Group of the BCSSS and the Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISIS. The ISIS board confirmed only recently the establishment of that SIG. Its Chair is Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Co-Chair Hans-Jörg Kreowski, Secretary Rainer E. Zimmermann. Interested faculty is welcome to join the group.

The LS colloquium will be held in German on 10 December 2015 in Berlin, Rathaus Tiergarten. The entrance is free. See the programme here and the abstracts and cvs of the speakers here. The colloquium gets support from the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung according to the guidelines of the German Federal Agency for Civic Education.

The colloquium will comprise contributions that comply with the dictum of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the following way: theory, that is, systems theory, with praxis, that is, informatics, and the common good, that is, a global sustainable information society.

See the presentations held and a report in German here.

Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, the new President of ISIS, will visit Vienna and participate in her role as Vice-Dean for doctoral education at the Department of Applied Information Technology at Chalmers University, Gothenburg, in the Workshop for Deans, Department Chairs and Research Directors at the 11th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2015).

Outside that meeting, she will present at the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) A Taxonomy of Computation and Information Architecture she has elaborated together with Mark Burgin. The question they try to answer is how the Turing model of computation relates to the processes of self-organisation of natural systems: Are they different or do they have something in common? That question is a fundamental one for the “Emergent systems, information and society” group – a joint group of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS), the Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, and ISIS – that was founded on the Vienna Summit last June with the task to extend a generic systems perspective to computer science issues. Gordana is member of that group.

The talk will be given on Tuesday, 13 October 2015, 16:15-17:45, in the facilities of the OCG: Heinz Zemanek Saal, Wollzeile 1, 1010 Vienna. The entrance is free.

The event is organised by the BCSSS, the Austrian Computer Society Working Group Information Studies, and the Institute for Design and Technology Assessment of the TU Wien.

The Cub of Vienna invites to a one-day Tagung in German on “Gesellschaftliche Bedeutung einer neuen Technologie”. It will be held in Vienna on Wednesday, 7 October 2015. Dirk Helbing, ETH Zürich, is guest and first speaker. He was also invited speaker at our Summit. The speaker that follows is Yvonne Hofstetter who is known for her critical book on Big Data.

See here for the whole programme.

End of October, a colloquium for the convivialist movement is organised at the Université Rennes 2 in France. ISIS Summit speaker Marc Humbert is scheduled after Edgar Morin, Ludwig von Bertalanffy Award in Complexity Thinking laureate in 2012, for the theory section of the programme.

Summit speaker Frank Adloff from Germany will – besides colleagues from Brazil, Italy and Japan – represent the international dimension of the convivialist movement .

Follow that link.

Frank Adloff, together with Volker Heins, has just edited a book in German for civil society actors on Konvivialismus. Eine Debatte.

The naturhistorisches museum wien works on a refurbished prehistory exhibition. The Venus of Willendorf gets a new home (see picture (photo: nhm) – on the right, Dr. Walpurga Antl who accompanied us on the ship excursion).

By the way, new methods of dating the exhibit revealed that it was produced 4.500 years earlier – that is, 29.500 years ago!

The new exhibition will be opened end of September. See here.

The World-Information Institute, residing in Vienna, founded by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder, together with the TU Vienna Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, holds a one-day conference on 25 September 2015 on the regulatory politics of code and machines. It’s about “the growing influence of digital control systems and their cascading chains of agency on the cultural and social reality”.

Peter Purgathofer, TU Vienna, is the first speaker at the conference. He will give examples of what software can already do today.

See the full programme here.

LIVESTREAM: world-information.net/algorithmic-regimes/