L’European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research terrà la sua ventunesima edizione a Vienna (nel campus dell’Università di Vienna dove si è svolto anche l’ultimo ECCS) dal 10 al 13 aprile del 2012.

Ecco la presentazione:

Our world is at crisis. Global challenges abound. However, they have a “dark” and a “bright” side. The dark side is the imminent danger of the breakdown of interdependent societies with the perspective of extermination of civilised human life. The bright side marks a possible entrance to a new stage of evolution of humanity, to the self-organisation of a humane world society.

Cybernetics, systems research, the sciences of complexity – all of them have the potential to endow the subjects of history with guidance and a means for mastering the current transformation. But the readiness of cybernetic, systems and complex thinking for the tasks ahead has to be continuously reassessed and improved. The time has come to reflect on the aims, the scope and the tools of a multitude of approaches. Platforms for the self-understanding of the whole field are needed now more than ever.

Since 1972, the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR) have been held in Austria every two years. The upcoming meetings will be organised by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS) in cooperation with the Austrian Computer Society (OCG) and a number of other organisations in the field.

Their main focus will be on the self-understanding of the field, in particular, on (1) illuminating the underlying assumptions that make approaches distinct from each other or are shared by them while (2) questioning the impact on society.

The meeting is open to any researcher in the field, be it systems biology or information systems, complex adaptive systems or sociocybernetics, evolutionary economics or ecosystems research, systems philosophy or constructivism, self-organisation or cognitive science, network theory or artificial intelligence or any other specialisation that is rooted in cybernetics, systems theory or complexity theory.