FIS and the 2002 Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research

Dear colleagues,

Robert Trappl has kindly offered a venue for a symposium on FIS at the 2002
European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research. Guenther Ossimitz
(one of Robert's colleagues) and I will coordinate the session. I have put
together a draft of a brief call for papers (attached). Any comments for
alteration/improvements are most welcome. This seems to be a reasonable way
for us to continue the work of the FIS group, and to give our European
colleagues a chance to participate.

We can also develop a session at the ISSS 2002 meeting in Shanghai. We do
not yet have a call for papers created for that meeting. An elaboration of
the EMCSR call may be a good starting point; however, I think that it may
be time for us to re-examine the directions in which we are pursuing all of
this enterprise-- and to rekindle the debates in this list.

My personal reaction is that the "society of individuals" may become
constrained by the "society of machines" (where machines include everything
from computers to bureaucracies) unless we pay serious attention to the way
in which tasks are apportioned between human beings and machines; and the
bases for task apportionment have to do with the nature of "information"...

Regards,

Bela