WOSC International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems

Citation

Vallee, R. (2012), "WOSC International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems", Kybernetes, Vol. 41 No. 5/6. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2012.06741eaa.008

WOSC International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems

Article Type: WOSC International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems From: Kybernetes, Volume 41, Issue 5/6

It is my pleasure, as President of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics, to wish the greatest success to the “15th WOSC International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems” held jointly with the “2011 IEEE Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligence Services” at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The WOSC Congress is devoted to the many aspects of cybernetics and systems. Among them we must not forget information, considered as extremely important by Wiener, and all influences that could spoil it and which we may subsume under the general concept of noise. When he was very young Wiener wrote an essay on “The Theory of Ignorance” showing our limitations in the quest of knowledge. Indeed error abounds while truth is scarce. So it is important to study imperfect knowledge, the way we get, manipulate it and try to restaure the part of truth it contains. A step in this direction has been the introduction by Study of the notion dual number which we interpret as representing the result of a scalar measure joined to the uncertainty affecting it. A prior attempt has been probability theory, followed much later by fuzzy sets introduced by Lofti Zadeh. The synthesis of all sorts of uncertainty notions has been mainly started in China by Professors Julong Deng, Sifeng Liu and Yi Lin, under the aegis of “grey knowledge” situated between “white knowledge” identified with perfect truth and “black knowledge” representing absolute error. Certainly Wiener would have appreciated this orientation of cybernetics.

Other aspects of cybernetics were in germ in Wiener’s works. In the feedback scheme there is a device, belonging to the system, which evaluates, with some uncertainty, the difference between the present state and the state desired. This evaluation is the result of an observation of the system by the system, it belongs to what has been called “second order cybernetics”. If we develop this idea of evaluation we come to what I called “observation operators”, followed by decision operator and their product “pragmatic operator”, already present, in a rudimentary way, in the feedback concept.

These two possible directions of evolution of cybernetics and systems intends to show the importance of Wiener’s ideas and give an extension which may be a theory of perception-decision-action, seen as an “epistemo-praxiology” not excluding the intervention of imprecise knowledge and imprecise action. These propositions are, in advance, a contribution to the celebration in 2014 of the 50th anniversary of Wiener’s death.

I must not forget to thank all people who collaborated to the organization of this meeting and the organisms involved: “IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society”, “Natural Science Foundation of China”, “Grey Systems Society of China”, “College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics”, “Institute for Grey Systems Studies”, “Center for Innovation and Development Studies”, “Jiangsu Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics”.

Thank you for your attention.

Robert ValléeProfessor Emeritus Université Paris-Nord, President of WOSC