Citation
Hutton, D.M. (1998), "News of cybernetics and systems organisations and societies", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.06727hab.002
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 1998, MCB UP Limited
News of cybernetics and systems organisations and societies
News of cybernetics and systems organisations and societies
World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC)
WOSC supported conferences
The World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics has sponsored numerous congresses, conferences and other meetings during the last year. It has also offered support on international programme planning committees and participated in the major meetings worldwide that have been organised for cyberneticians and systemists.
The WOSC president, Professor Stafford Beer and the director-general Professor Robert Vallée, who is also Professeur Émérite De L'Université Paris-Nord have been invited to address and present their research at numerous events concerned with the fields of systems and cybernetics. Professor Vallée was the distinguished chairman of the 15th International Congress on Cybernetics (Namur, Belgium, 1998).
Details of these events are included in the various relevant sections of this journal, which has been chosen as the organisation's official publication.
Norbert Wiener Award for outstanding papers
The nominations for the Norbert Wiener Award and the Highly Commended Awards for outstanding papers published in Kybernetes (Vol. 26) were supported by a WOSC judging panel headed by the director-general and the director of the Norbert Wiener Institute. This proved to be an extremely difficult task and the judging panel is to be congratulated on its final list of nominated award winners. The panel was very conscious that any award bearing the name of the organisation's President in Memoriam could only be presented to the author(s) of a contribution that was of a very high standard. Details of the awards and the presentations are given in this issue, and readers may judge for themselves the extremely high standards achieved by referring to the cited referenced contributions.
Norbert Wiener Institute
Cyberneticians and systemists worldwide are co-operating to produce research and development contributions through the work of the institute. Many of these endeavours result in reports and in publications in the literature. Much of the activity, however, is unseen and unheralded because it involves liaison and collaboration between scientists who are engaged in the same area of study and pursuing the same researchers. The most important aim of the Institute is to put like-minded people in touch with one another and to encourage collaboration and the interchange of ideas and information. Contacts already established have proved extremely worthwhile and, for example, the results are often published as invited or distinguished contributions in this journal, and in many other learned publications. The Website pages concerning the Institute are being updated so that the current contact locations can be more clearly identified.
WOSC Website
Contact with WOSC can be made through the pages of the WOSC Website, which is being made available by Dr A.M. Andrew, the Director of Affiliations and the Internet Editor of this journal. The Website is at: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/AlexAndrew/wosc.htm
WOSC Triennial Conference
Arrangements for the WOSC World Congress, held triennially, are in hand, and an announcement to finalise the programme will be published in this journal. Organisations affiliated to WOSC are invited to contact the WOSC Secretariat or any of the directors about sponsorship or participation matters. The venue for the 11th Congress is Brunel University, Uxbridge, West London, UK, and it will be held from Monday 23 August until Friday 27 August, 1999.
American Society for Cybernetics (ASC)
The ASC was founded in 1964 to facilitate the work of those with an interest in the field of cybernetics. The society holds a conference approximately each year, conducts seminars on the fundamentals of cybernetics, maintains a listserve on cybernetics, and has published a series of books.
The ASC is dedicated to the advancement of the field of cybernetics. The objective is to develop a metadisciplinary language with which we may better understand and modify our world. This is accomplished through meetings, discussions and conferences.
The history of the ASC began in Washington, DC in the late 1950s when a group of individuals who had been meeting monthly to discuss developments in the field of cybernetics, formed an unchartered social organization called the Washington Cybernetics Society. These meetings led to the founding of a national professional organization, which was incorporated on 31 July 1964, as the ASC. The goal of this new organization was to support the development of the discipline of cybernetics, to anticipate the impact of cybernetics, and to provide information on cybernetics.
Information about the Society can be obtained from ASC, 2033 K St NW, Suite No. 230, Washington, DC 20052. Tel: (202) 994 5203; Fax: (202) 994 5225; E-mail: asc@www.gwu.edu; URL: http://www.gwu.edu/~asc
The Cybernetics Society 1998 Programme
The programme of meetings for the Summer 1998 included the following:
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"Communication in plants and animals" by Harry Moore, formerly Visiting Lecturer in Cybernetics at Chelsea College (now King's College), University of London.
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"Tensions in truth claims: a sociological investigation into the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences" by Raymond Johnson, Department of Sociology, University of Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey.
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"The pRAM and its applications" by Professor T.G. Clarkson, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, King's College London, University of London, Strand, London.
Annual General Meeting
All these events were scheduled at Room 11A at King's College, Strand, London WC2R 2LS. The Annual General Meeting of the Society preceded Professor Clarkson's presentation.
A Website
The programme has been made available by Brian Warburton at the Website: http://members.aol.com/BrWarburto/cyberneticsoc/cybersoc2.htm. Comments and suggestions for developing this Website are welcome.
The September Conference
The society sent a group to the Triennial Namur conference this year. As a result there has been a shortage of effort available to organise the usual September one-day conference.
General enquiries about the society
For general enquiries and information about the society contact its officers at the following addresses, or visit the Website: Dr Brian Warburton, 37A Oatlands Avenue, Weybridge, Surrey KT13 9SS. Tel: 01932 843 602; E-mail: BrWarburto@aol.com or Mr A.G. Booth, 42 Buckleigh Road, London SW16 5RZ. Tel/Fax: 0181 679 6968; E-mail: abooth@cix.co.uk
International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR)
IFSR has announced that its Newsletters, published since No. 9, June 1993, can now be viewed on its FTP-Server. Access is obtained using: ftp.sea.uni-linz.ac.at and by looking into the directory public/SFSRNL.
It should be noted that originally the Newsletters were numbered consecutively from No. 1 (Autumn 1981) to No. 39 (December 1995). Since 1996 they are numbered by volume and number (Vol. 15 No. 1 is also No. 40). The most recent publication received by this journal was March 1998, Vol. 17 No. 1 (No. 48). The editor-in-chief (Dr Gerhard Chroust) can be contacted at Systemtechnik und Automation.
This issue of the IFSR Newsletter looked at:
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New trends testing with personal probabilities: Eleven-year-olds can correctly estimate their personal probabilities.
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AURA III AURA as a way to define group awareness.
Also included were items concerning:
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Project reports Book news Journals-systems Member societies.
Currently the report of the IFSR Board Meeting is awaited (see Agenda in Newsletter 16/3). A Strategy Meeting of the IFSR was also arranged after the EMCSR '98 14th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research held 14-17 April 1998.
It is reported that the Management Science Society of Ireland (MSSI) has been accepted for membership of the IFSR (see announcement of the EC Meeting, Newsletter, Vol. 17 No. 1, 1988).
Systemtechnik und Automation, Johannes Kepler University Linz, 4040 Linz, Austria; E-mail: GC@UNI-LINZ.AC.AT; Tel: +43 732 2468 865; Fax: +43 732 2468 878; www-home page: http://www.sea.uni-linz.ac.at/ifsr/