International Advisory Board

This page is under construction – further board members will be added soon.

Dirk Baecker

Dirk Baecker

Dirk Baecker studied sociology, economics, and economic history at universities of Cologne and Paris-IX (Dauphine). He did his philosophical dissertation with Professor Niklas Luhmann at University of Bielefeld from 1982 to 1986, and his Habilitation at University of Bielefeld from 1990 to 1992. In 1996 he was appointed as Reinhard Mohn Professor of Entrepreneurship, Business Ethics, and Social Change at the Department for Business Economics at University Witten/Herdecke, and in 2000 was appointed to the chair of sociology at the Department for Fundamental Studies at University Witten/Herdecke. In 2007 he was appointed to the chair of cultural theory and analysis at Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany. Coeditor of the journal Soziale Systeme: Zeitschrift für soziologische Theorie (since 1995), cofounder of the center for management and consulting education Management Zentrum Witten (2000–11), board member of the journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing. Areas of Interest: sociological theory, culture theory, economic sociology, organization research, and management education. Internet: http://www.zu.de/baecker and http://catjects.wordpress.com.
Søren Brier

Søren Brier

Søren Brier is Professor in the Semiotics of Information, Cognition and Communication Sciences at the Centre for International Business Communication Studies at Copenhagen Business School, where he has been teaching philosophy of science as well as semiotics on five different communication programs. He is MSc in biology from U. of Copenhagen, Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science at U. of Roskilde and Doctor (Habil) of Philosophy at CBS, the founder and editor of the interdisciplinary quarterly journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing, a fellow of the American Society for Cybernetics and is awarded with The Warren McCulloch Award; member of the board of Int. Ass. For Biosemiotic Studies and its journal Biosemiotics as well as the scientific board of The Science of Information Institute and Foundation of Information Science and of several scientific journals. His research interest focussed on the transdisciplinary foundation for the interplay between cybernetic and systemic information science and Peircean triadic semiotics also in its modern development as a part of biosemiotics.
Pille Bunnell

Pille Bunnell

Pille Bunnell is a Systems Ecologist who stumbled into the ASC, found a community of like-mineded thinkers, and discovered that second order cybernetics was just the missing ingredient in her own thinking. After finishing her Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of Berkeley, CA, she became engaged as a Postdoc and later as a Research associate with a group at the University of British Columbia who were in the process of developing Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management which subsequently evolved into Panarchy studies and the Resilience Alliance. Pille then spent much of her career as an Environmental Consultant working internationally. Following conducting the 2001 ASC conference during her tenure as President, she found that her passion is teaching. She currently teaches in several Graduate Programs, particularly at Royal Roads University and SelfDesign Graduate Institute. In all her courses she introduces second order cybernetics, particularly influenced by the work of Maturana, but also including many others from the cybernetics community. She integrates these views with more traditional perspectives of the domain being studied in each course. To support her teaching Pille engaged in an ongoing process of developing an extensive Creative Commons website. Though Pille’s publication list is extensive, much of it is white papers written for clients during her decades of consultancy. Other references and a full CV will be posted on the above website anon.
Nagib Callaos

Nagib Callaos

Nagib Callaos obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. In his dissertation, he gave a Mathematical Solution to the 200 years old problem of the Voter Paradox in opposition to Kenneth Arrow’s (Nobel Prize) “Impossibility Theorem” and showed the inconsistencies in Arrow’s axioms. As full professor, he taught and researched mainly in the areas of Decision Theory, Information Systems, General Systems Theory, Information Management, Operations Research, etc. He was Dean of Research of the University Simón Bolívar (USB). As Dean, he founded the Foundation of R&D of USB, which purpose is to integrate academic activities with Industry and Society. He also founded the consulting firm “Callaos and Associates,” with a similar purpose. He consulted in corporations that are the largest in Venezuela. He was the director of more than 150 R&D academic and professional projects, and published about 200 articles and teaching support monographs. He was selected by the Venezuelan President (via Presidential Decree) from 150.000 Venezuelan engineers, as one of 30 founding and lasting for life members of the Venezuelan Academy of Engineering. He was granted several national and international awards. After retirement, he 1) founded and presided the International Institute of Informatics and systemic (IIIS, www.iiis.org), 2) co-edited about 80 books (conference proceedings), and was Editor-in-Chief of both the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics and its Spanish version.
Bruce Clarke

Bruce Clarke

Bruce Clarke is the Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science and Chair of the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He edits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press. He has been Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. He is the author of Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis; Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science; Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics; Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems; and Neocybernetics and Narrative; and the coeditor of From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature; Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory; and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Science. His edited collection Earth, Life & System: Interdisciplinary Essays on Environment and Evolution is forthcoming.
Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman

Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman

For thirty years, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have been tracking the human impact of the communication revolution Norbert Wiener’s science of Cybernetics ignited at the midpoint of the 20th century. Their award-winning book, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics uncovers the hidden dimensions of Wiener’s saga, as they trace Wiener’s life, science, and social activism that began the debate on the human impact of the new technologies. Conway received her B.A. from the University of New Mexico. She earned her master’s degree and was advanced to doctoral candidacy at the University of Oregon, where she pioneered the first interdisciplinary program in communication. Siegelman graduated with honors in philosophy from Harvard and studied philosophy and semiotics as recipient of the Fiske Fellowship to Trinity College, Cambridge. The two have appeared widely in the media and lectured at more than 40 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe.
Raúl Espejo

Raúl Espejo

Raúl Espejo is Director-General of the World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC). From 1971 to 1973 he was operations director of the CYBERSYN project – the Chilean Government’s project for the management of the social economy, under the scientific direction of Professor Stafford Beer. He was full professor at the University of Lincoln UK from 1996 to 2002 and visiting professor at several universities afterwards. The main focus of his research is on organisational systems, and has published several books and contributed extensively to books and journals. Over the years Professor Espejo has worked with a wide range of organisations worldwide, including national and local governments and small and large enterprises. He has been consultant of organisations like Hoechst AG in Germany, Hydro Aluminium in Norway, 3M in Europe, EdF in France, the Nuclear Inspectorate in Sweden and the National Audit Office and the Ministry of Education in Colombia.
Kathleen Forsythe

Kathleen Forsythe

Kathleen Forsythe discovered the ASC in 1983 and has been involved off and on ever since. As well as being an Ombudsperson in the 1980s and again in the 1990s, Kathleen was Vice President of the ASC when Pille Bunnell was President. The many friends and colleagues met through the ASC have had a seminal influence on her career and life. As a practical visionary, she has instantiated her work with second order cybernetics in both management and education through developing novel and innovative learning systems and organizations. She has been influenced by the work of Gordon Pask in Conversation Theory, Humberto Maturana in the Biology of Cognition and the Biology of Love, and Stafford Beer in the viable systems model and syntegration. Herself one of the first graduates of the UK’s Open University ( 1974, 2000), Kathleen was the founding Executive Director of British Columbia’s Knowledge Network, (1980-86) one of the first satellite telecommunications networks for learning in the world. She is currently Principal of SelfDesign Learning Community, a unique online learning environment and accredited independent school. She is also the Executive Director of the SelfDesign Learning Foundation and the Chair of the Board of the Living Language Institute Foundation. She is a 2006 award winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence, one of Canada’s highest education awards. Most recently she has oriented her activities to work with families with children on the Autistic Spectrum. A grandmother, mixed media artist, published poet and writer, Kathleen Forsythe has a lived commitment to imagination and innovation.
Charles François

Charles François

Charles François is the author and founding editor of the International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (München, 1997 and 2004), which gives an overview of more than 40 years of developments in Systems and Cybernetics. Belgian born (1922) he studied Consular and Commercial Sciences at Brussels Free University, and in 1952 through Norbert Wiener´s fundational work on “Cybernetics”, he started research and teaching of the systems sciences and related methodologies. He is member of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR), Austria, since its beginnings, participating since many years ago in its Meetings and in the Fuschl Conversations; in contact since 1955 with the now International Society for the Systems Sciences as member, and Honorary Member of advisory boards of various european systemic institutions and of the IASCYS. He founded and was elected president of the Argentine Association for the Study of Systems and Cybernetics (GESI), Argentine Branch of the ISSS, being presently its Honorary President. He established closed connections between systems societies in Spain and countries of the Latin American Region. He was one of the founders and is Honorary Presidente of ALAS (Asociación Latinoamericana de Sistémica) in 2006, in recognition to his contributions and life work devoted in great part to the research and diffusion of the systemic methodology. In 2007 he has been awarded the Norbert Wiener Medal of the American Society of Cybernetics for his contributions in this field of research.
Dai Griffiths

Dai Griffiths

Dai Griffiths is a professor at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics. His background is in the arts and in education, and he has taught at many levels including primary and secondary education, higher education and continuing education, and in industry. Since the early 1990s he has worked on a range of projects focusing on various aspects of technology and education, as a developer, researcher and project manager. He has spent most of his career in Spain, and gained his PhD from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. His professional activity with eLearning started in as a multimedia developer, and expanded into research focused on the use of robotics with young children. In recent years a principal concern has been on the representations of learning processes (both formal land informal) at the various levels of the education system. He is interested in their implications for and interactions with pedagogy, organisation and technology, with the current application of data analytics methods to education being a particularly pressing issue. In the course of this work it became clear that the ambitions and intended consequences of technology in education were not being fulfilled in practice. In seeking to understand why this was the case, he became engaged with the broad sweep of work carried out under the banner of cybernetics. This inquiry was initially undertaken in collaboration with Professor Oleg Liber, and is now continued in his role as Professor of Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton.
Jifa Gu

Jifa Gu

Jifa Gu Professor in Academy of Mathematics and Systems Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), his interests are Operations Research and Systems Engineering . He has participated in more than 40 researches and applied projects, and published more than 30 books and 300 papers, and received 14 various awards and prizes. He has worked for a major project related to Meta-synthesis approach supported by National Science Foundation of China during 1999-2004. Starting from 2004 till now he joined a research related to social stability supported by CAS. From 2006 to 2011 he joined a project on the experiences in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) doctors supported by Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). At 2010 till now he joined a 973 program related to social collective behavior supported by MOST. Now he is an academician and vice-president of International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Sciences.
Jesper Hoffmeyer

Jesper Hoffmeyer

Jesper Hoffmeyer Cand. Scient (biochemistry) at University of Copenhagen. Dr. Phil. (semiotics) at Aarhus University. b. 1942. Professor emeritus at Biological Institute, University of Copenhagen. Did work in experimental biochemistry in the 1970s. During 1980s the research interests gradually turned towards questions of theoretical biology. From 1988 work has focused on the developing field of biosemiotics. President of the International Society for Biosemiotics Studies. Editor of the Springer Book Series on Biosemiotics. Member of The International Committee of Jakob von Uexküll Centre, Tartu University, Estonia. Thomas A. Sebeok Fellowship, accorded by the American Semiotics Association. Recent publications include A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics, Springer 2008, Biosemiotics. An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, University of Scranton Press 2008, and Why do we need a semiotic understanding of life? In Brian Henning and Adam Scarfe (editors): Beyond Mechanism, Lexington Books 2013.
Wolfgang Hofkirchner

Wolfgang Hofkirchner

Wolfgang Hofkirchner is Associate Professor for Technology Assessment at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. Being educated as Political Scientist and Psychologist, he has been working since in the field of Science–Technology–Society. In 2001 he acquired the venia docendi in Technology Assessment and was University Professor for Internet and Society from 2004 to 2010 at the University of Salzburg. Among various stays abroad he did research and teaching at the University of León and the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. His fields of interest comprise: Complexity Thinking, Sciences of Information and ICTs and Society. He counts moe than 200 publications. He has been appointed an academician of the Leibniz-Sozietät der Wissenschaften zu Berlin and of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences. He runs the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Research and is currently President of the International Society for Information Studies.
Ray Ison

Ray Ison

Ray Ison is Professor, Systems for Sustainability at the Monash Sustainability Institute (MSI), and Professor of Systems, The Open University UK (OU). He is responsible at present within the CADWAGO project for a work package on systemic governance and leads the Systemic Governance Research Program in MSI; at the OU is co- responsible for managing a post-graduate program in Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP). He is President Elect of the ISSS (International Society for the Systems Sciences). Ray headed the OU Systems Department (1995-8; 25 academic staff) then from 2000-04 successfully coordinated a major interdisciplinary 5th Framework program (30 researchers, 6 countries) researching social learning for sustainable catchment management as well as running an EPSRC funded Systems Practice for Managing Complexity Network. His contributions to systemic governance research began with pioneering work on participatory natural resource management (1985). He is the (co) author or (co) editor of 5 books, 28 book chapters, 90 refereed papers, 60+ other publications, 5 journal special editions and has been an invited Keynote speaker at 32 international and 39 national conferences. He has had a wide range of significant national and international appointments based on his international academic standing.
Jane Jorgenson

Jane Jorgenson

Jane Jorgenson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her teaching and research center on organizational and family communication, and her recent work explores the role of framing and sensemaking processes in the production of organizational realities. She has also conducted research on work-family relationships, including studies of dual-career academic couples and of children’s roles as technology experts within the family. She has published articles in Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung and other journals, and she serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Family Communication and Women and Language. She received her PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Louis H. Kauffman

Louis H. Kauffman

Louis H. Kauffman was born in Potsdam, New York on Feb. 3, 1945. He graduated from Norwood-Norfolk Central High School in 1962 as valedictorian. He received the degree of B.S. in Mathematics from MIT in 1966 and a PhD. in Mathematics by Princeton University in 1972. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Kauffman is the author of four books on knot theory, a book on map coloring and the reformulation of mathematical problems, and is the editor of the World-Scientific ‘Book Series On Knots and Everything’. He is the Editor in Chief and founding editor of the Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications. Kauffman is the recipient of a 1993 University Scholar Award by the University of Illinois at Chicago and he is the 1993 recipient of the Warren McCulloch Memorial Award of the American Society for Cybernetics for significant contributions to the field of Cybernetics and the 1996 award of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association for his contribution to the understanding of discrete physics. He was president of the American Society for Cybernetics from 2005 to 2008, and Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Society of America from 2008 to 2010. His present work is on virtual knot theory, graphical lambda calculus, foundations of quantum physics and quantum computing, and the formulation of cybernetics in terms of form, eigenform and reflexive dynamics.
Klaus Krippendorff

Klaus Krippendorff

Klaus Krippendorff is an Emeritus Professor of Communication and Gregory Bateson Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, Ph.D h.c. Linnaeus U., Sweden. He was a student of Ross Ashby, has been a Past President of the International Communication Association (ICA), is an elected Fellow of NIAS, AAAS and ICA, the recipient of two Norbert Wiener Medals for cybernetics, and continues as a member of the editorial boards of numerous academic communication journals. He contributed over a hundred articles and book chapters on human communication theory, methodology in the social sciences, cybernetics, and design; and authored The Analysis of Communication Content (Co-editor); Content Analysis, An Introduction to its Methodology (translated into Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Hungarian, Persian, and recipient of the 2004 ICA Fellows Award for lasting contributions to the field); Information Theory; A dictionary of Cybernetics; Communication and Control in Society (Editor); Design in the Age of Information (Editor) and The semantic Turn, A new Foundation for Design (translated into Japanese and German). He also pioneered Krippendorff’s Alpha, a reliability statistics. He consulted on a number of design projects, largely on human-computer interactions, and advocated ethnographic design research methods. His current work focuses on epistemology and language use: discursive participation in the social construction of realities; discursive cybernetics; critical (emancipatory) social theory; and on the human-centered and culture-sensitive design of artifacts, be they social or material.
Allenna Leonard

Allenna Leonard

Allenna Leonard, PhD is an independent consultant and director of the Cwarel Isaf Institute, a division of the Malik Management Center devoted to the development and dissemination of the work of Stafford Beer. She has primarily specialized in the application of Beer’s Viable System Model and the delivery of his Team Syntegrity process. Among her projects have been improving accountability measures, development of indices for resilience and methods of improving dialogue and integrating multiple perspectives. She is past president of the American Society for Cybernetics and the International Society for Systems Sciences and continues to be active in both organizations. She has also taught systems thinking and delivered workshops as an adjunct faculty member in a number of universities. Some of her papers are available on her website.
Michael Lissack

Michael Lissack

Michael Lissack is the executive director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence (ISCE), the ISCE Professor of Meaning in Organizations, the first Walter J. Hickel Professor at Alaska Pacific University, and a serial entrepreneur. He founded both a non-profit research institute and a charity for artists, launched an international PhD program in corporate anthropology, has written half dozen books, been a successful Wall Street banker, and a candidate for public office. Dr. Lissack has taught at a number of academic institutions in the US and Europe, run nine international conferences on the topics of complexity, management, health care, entanglement and ethics and founded a successful academic journal (E:CO). Worth Magazine recognized Dr. Lissack as one of “Wall Street’s 25 Smartest Players” in 1999 and as one of the 100 Americans who have most influenced “how we think about money” in 2001. His most recent invention – an Internet research reference librarian replacement can be found at http://epi-search.com. His most recent academic work can be found at http://epi-thinking.org.
Judith Lombardi

Judith Lombardi

Judith (Jude) Lombardi, a social worker by trade decided to explore cybernetics while searching for radical ways of thinking about thinking and being human. In 1992 while working on a PhD in Human Relations and Cybernetics (Humane Cybernetics), Lombardi attended her first American Society for Cybernetics conference. Over the last 20 years, with video camera in hand, she has recorded a variety of cybernetic activities, interviews and ASC conferences. Dr. Lombardi taught sociology at a university in Baltimore Maryland USA. She retired from the university several years ago so that she might devote more of her time to her video documentation and research. Her current work entails writing and video-making that focuses on “social” transformations as a praxis for living. Judy Lombardi was treasurer of the ASC during the mid 1990s, a member of the planning committee for the 1993 ASC conference in Philadelphia, as well as the 1997 conference in Champaign Urbana, IL.
Robert J. Martin

Robert J. Martin

Robert J. Martin is a composer, licensed psychologist, and Professor Emeritus at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. He completed a doctorate in Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, completing an interdisciplinary thesis under Heinz von Foerster and Herbert Brun. He has published two books with Prentice-Hall, the first on teaching, the second on communication skills. He maintained a private practice as psychotherapist, working with children, adults, and families. A long-term member of the American Society of Cybernetics, he served on the ASC Executive Committee for two terms. Since retiring from teaching in 2013, he has turned his attention to composition and recently completed a cycle of string solos, duets, and quartets on the topic of wind energy and wind machines.
Tatiana Medvedeva

Tatiana Medvedeva

Tatiana Medvedeva is an Associate Professor in the Department of World Economy and Law at Siberian State University of Transport, Novosibirsk, Russia. At her university she is a former Director of the Scientific and Practical Center for Business and Management. She uses group facilitation methods in teaching and consulting with managers of Russian enterprises. On two occasions she was a visiting scholar at Georgetown University and George Washington University in Washington, DC. She received a diploma in economic cybernetics from Novosibirsk State University and a kandidatskaya degree (Ph.D) in economics from Moscow State University. She is now working on her doctorskaya degree at the latter university. Most of her scientific writings concern the economics of transitions and change management, including the changes in values, beliefs, and institutions now occurring in the post-communist countries. She has published papers in several systems and cybernetics journals and made presentations at conferences in East and West Europe, Russia, and the USA.
Gary Metcalf

Gary Metcalf

Gary Metcalf is a professor in the Graduate School of Management at Sullivan University, and in the School of Organizational Leadership and Transformation at Saybrook University, both in the US. He teaches part-time in the Creative Sustainability program at Aalto University in Finland. He currently serves as president of the International Federation for Systems Research, and is past president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. from Saybrook University under the mentorship of Bela H. Banathy, and recently published the book Social Systems and Design, as the first volume in the Translational Systems Science series. He maintains a consulting practice through InterConnections, LLC and has been active in research, including service systems.
Gerald Midgley

Gerald Midgley

Gerald Midgley is Professor of Systems Thinking at the University of Hull, UK. He also holds Adjunct Professorships at the University of Queensland, Australia; the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Mälardalen University, Sweden; and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. From 2003-2010, he was a Senior Science Leader in the Social Systems Group at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (New Zealand). He has had over 300 papers on systems thinking and stakeholder engagement published in international journals, edited books and practitioner magazines, and has been involved in a wide variety of public sector, community development, technology foresight and resource management research projects. He is the 2013/14 President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, and has written or edited 11 books including, Systemic Intervention: Philosophy, Methodology, and Practice (Kluwer, 2000); Operational Research and Environmental Management: A New Agenda (Operational Research Society, 2001); Systems Thinking, Volumes I-IV (Sage, 2003); Community Operational Research: OR and Systems Thinking for Community Development (Kluwer, 2004); and Forensic DNA Evidence on Trial: Science and Uncertainty in the Courtroom (Emergent, 2011).
Matjaz Mulej, 1941, Slovenian. He retired from University of Maribor as Professor Emeritus in Systems and Innovation Theory. He has +1.600 publications in +40 countries (see: IZUM/Cobiss/Bibliographies, 08082); +60 publications in world-top journals, and close to 400 citations, of which +100 in world-top journals. He was visiting professor abroad for 15 semesters, including Cornell U., Ithaca, NY, and others in Austria, China, Germany, Mexico, USA, about 50 further shorter visits with classes for students around the world. He has served as consultant or speaker in/for enterprises about 500 times in six countries. He authored: Dialectical Systems Theory (see: François, 2004, International Encyclopedia ..); Innovative Business Paradigm for countries/enterprises in transition and Methods of creative interdisciplinary cooperation USOMID and USOMID with 6 Thinking Hats. His investigating and publishing runs in teams, mostly. He was nominated member by: New York Academy of Sciences (1996), European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Salzburg (2004), European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Paris (2004), International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences, Vienna (2010; president until 2012). In IFSR (International Federation for Systems Research with 46 member associations) he was president in 2006-2010. He has received many rewards for his work on systems approach to innovation in Yugoslavia, Slovenia, Maribor and University of Maribor and many ‘Who is Who’ entries and invitations, Slovenian and international. His B.A. is in economic analysis, M.A. in Development Economics, Doctorates in Economics/Systems Theory, and in Management/Innovation Management. He is married for +50 years and has 2 adult children, 4 grand-children. In 2013 and 2014 ten book and articles collections are being published under him as editor or guest editor. EPF homepage: epfip.uni-mb.si; IRDO (Institute for development of social responsibility): www.irdo.si.
MGPL Narayana

MGPL Narayana

MGPL Narayana served in various software development projects in TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) and managed a delivery center for a telecom multinational company. He led business development for TCS in Silicon Valley, California during ‘97-2000. He initiated and managed TCS’s research collaborations with leading universities in US, earlier. Mr. Narayana holds Master in Engineering in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He holds memberships with international professional organizations such as ACM, GloGift, INCOSE, and ASC and he is a Senior Member of IEEE. He is a fellow of IETE. He holds several patents and publications and is on several international conference program committees including IEEE’s 21st Century Norbert Wiener Conference. As Vice President and Chief Scientist in TCS, Mr. Narayana currently leads Cybernetics research center in TCS. He won “2012 IEEE Outstanding Volunteer Award” for R10. His research interests include areas such as innovation management, software engineering, systems engineering and cybernetics.
Andrew Pickering

Andrew Pickering

Andrew Pickering began life as a physicist, with his first degree from Oxford and a PhD in particle physics from University College London. He changed fields to science and technology studies, completing a PhD the Science Studies Unit at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s. He taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before returning to Britain as professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter. His books include Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (1984), The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (1995) and, most recently, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (2010). His current project, ‘Art and Agency,’ grew out of earlier research on cybernetic art.
William J. Reckmeyer

William J. Reckmeyer

William J. Reckmeyer is a Professor of Leadership & Systems at San José State University. Bill is a systems scientist and practitioner whose teaching, research, and consulting has focused on the use of cybernetics to develop integrated collaborative approaches for addressing hyper-complex institutional and global issues. Most of his work over the past forty years has involved leading multi-year strategic change efforts in a broad mix of organizational/interagency settings and providing senior-level policy advice for the US, Californian, and Australian governments. Major professional responsibilities during the past decade have included positions as Faculty Chair of the Global Citizenship Program at Salzburg Global Seminar; Chief Systems Scientist for the Systems of Systems Center of Excellence with the US Department of Defense; and Strategic Advisor & Core Faculty for the California Agricultural Leadership Program. He has also served as a Visiting Professor or Senior Fellow at Harvard, Stanford, Sydney, Stockholm, and several other leading universities in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Bill is a Life Fellow and a former President of the American Society for Cybernetics; has been a Kellogg National Leadership Fellow, Salzburg Global Fellow, Fulbright Scholar-Host, and AASCU Global Scholar; and was recently honored by San José State as its Outstanding Professor. The author or editor of more than 60 books, articles, studies, and reports, his current work focuses on cybernetic approaches to global citizenship and to integrated national strategies.
Frederick Steier

Frederick Steier

Frederick Steier is currently on the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida, where he previously served as Director of Interdisciplinary Studies Programs. He is also a Scientist in Residence at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa, Florida. A Past-President of the American Society of Cybernetics (ASC) he has also served on Board of the ASC. He is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing, and has recently been named to the Advisory Board of the International Bateson Institute. His research focuses on systemic approaches to the understanding of, and transformation of, social systems of diverse kinds, with special attention to issues of communication and design, learning, and quality of life. He has also focused on participatory methodologies, including action research and use of World Café processes for collaborative learning in and design of social systems. His publications include the edited volume, Gregory Bateson: Essays for an ecology of ideas (2005), in celebration of the Gregory Bateson centennial, and the edited volume Research and Reflexivity (1991). Dr. Steier received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Social Systems Sciences, in 1983. In 1985, he had the honor of being named King Olav V Fellow, by the American-Scandinavian Foundation. This fellowship created an opportunity to do research and teach at the University of Oslo, and also allowed for the establishment of a collaborative relationships with researchers at the Work Research Institutes, in Oslo, and the University of Oslo. Prior to coming to the University of South Florida, Dr. Steier has held appointments in a variety of academic and research settings. These have included the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, where he served as a program Research Director, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Oslo, and Old Dominion University (where he also served as Director of the Center for Cybernetic Studies in Complex Systems). Dr. Steier has directed or been involved in cybernetics and systems research programs in a wide variety of settings, ranging from government institutions, including NASA, to family therapy based organizations, to science centers, such as the Museum of Science and Industry (Tampa), where he has led programs exploring the relationship between institutions of informal learning and communities. At the heart of many of these programs has been a concern with cybernetic approaches to the co-generation of actionable knowledge, the balance between stability and transformation, and the ways in which new media alter the soundscape and landscape of informal public life.
Ern Reynolds

Ern Reynolds

Ern Reynolds an American lawyer, is one of just five attorneys in the world considered to be a competent cybernetician. (The other four are citizens of Australia, Canada, Mexico, and Switzerland.) Ern regards this anomaly as a serious gap in law school curricula worldwide. Addressing this failure to understand what undergirds manmade law, he has written Dissolving the Hard Stuff: Using Beer and Cybernetic Basics for Governance. Ern composed this treatise as all-but-the-doctoral-thesis after studying formally under Stuart Umpleby. The book’s title puns upon reliance on Stafford Beer and Ross Ashby’s works as guiding him. In doing so he became a Clausewitz scholar. Ern served the ASC in the past as its elected Treasurer for nine years, and continues to serve as Legal Counsel. He claims to prefer the universal laws of communication and control to the manmade variety. He resides in Manhattan, and keeps his office in Roanoke, Virginia.
Larry Richards

Larry Richards

Larry Richards (aspiring craftsperson in and with time) acquired an early interest in cybernetics as an electrical engineering student at the University of Maine. His master’s degrees expanded that interest to systems theory (Aeronautical Systems, University of West Florida) and organizational design (MBA, Mississippi State University). His doctorate in operations research from the University of Pennsylvania focused his academic interests on decision making (especially non-purposeful, yet with intention), social transformation and design (especially non-violent and non-hierarchical), and epistemology (especially temporary knowledge and desire-based understanding), all with a foundation in ideas from the field of inquiry known as cybernetics. In addition to his education, Larry brings perspectives on cybernetics and society from multiple career-related experiences—unskilled labor, military, business, government, higher education. Larry now describes cybernetics as a way of thinking about ways of thinking (of which it—cybernetics—is one), and the cybernetician as a craftsperson in and with time, a label to which he aspires but does not yet claim. He served as President of the American Society for Cybernetics, 1986-89, which recognized him with its Norbert Wiener Medal in 2007, and of the American Society for Engineering Management, 1998-99, which elected him a Fellow in 2002. He currently applies his ideas on constraint, dialogic process and participation at Indiana University East in Richmond, Indiana, as an administrator and professor of management and informatics. More broadly and in his everyday life, he thinks about the connections between and among the arts, technology and society in our everyday lives, especially how we, as thinking, caring humans, can all make a difference in the world as we find it.
Alexander Riegler obtained a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science from Vienna University of Technology in 1995 with a dissertation on Artificial Life. Riegler’s interdisciplinary work include diverse areas such as knowledge representation and anticipation in cognitive science, post-Darwinian approaches in evolutionary theory, and constructivist and computational approaches to epistemology, see here. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Constructivist Foundations.
Stuart Umpleby

Stuart Umpleby

Stuart Umpleby is a professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at The George Washington University. He has taught courses in operations research, organizational behavior, process improvement, systems thinking, and the philosophy of science. He has published many papers in the fields of cybernetics and systems science. He is a past president of the American Society for Cybernetics and Associate Editor of the journal Cybernetics and Systems. The address of his website is www.gwu.edu/~umpleby.
Christine Welch

Christine Welch

Christine Welch, following more than 30 years’ service as a teacher and researcher, is now a Visiting Research Fellow in Portsmouth Business School, UK, where she is a member of the Operations & Systems Management Research Group and the Operations Research Centre. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Science, a master’s in Information Systems and a doctorate in Systems Analysis. Christine has research interests in the fields of Information Systems, Knowledge Management and Systems thinking. She has published many articles, conference papers and book chapters across these fields. She is a member of the Editorial Review Boards of several journals, including Informing Science: Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline and the International Journal of Systems and Society. She is co-author of The Manager’s Guide to Systems Practice (Wiley, 2012), and is a Director and former President of the UK Systems Society.
Randall Whitaker

Randall Whitaker

Randall Whitaker is currently the principal at Byggun Ltd, performing knowledge acquisition, cognitive task analyses, and interface / interaction design in the defense sector. His praxis served as the basis for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s development of its work-centered design (WCD) approach. His scholarly and professional activities draw on a number of sources within cybernetics – most especially Maturana and Varela. He’s a life member and former officer of the ASC.
Jennifer M Wilby

Jennifer M Wilby

Jennifer M. Wilby, PhD, MPH, MSc, is a Senior lecturer and member of the Centre for Systems Studies in the Business School at the University of Hull, UK, teaching and researching in the field of Management Systems and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetic Systems (IASCYS), President of the United Kingdom Systems Society (UKSS), Past President and Trustee of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), and currently Vice President for Administration for ISSS. Dr Wilby has also worked in Health research at the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) at the University of York, UK, and in Management Systems for two years in Lincoln, UK, and is currently researching trans-disciplinary systems approaches and interactions with critical systems practice, general systems theory, hierarchies and service systems science.
Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, the author of A New Kind of Science, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of his career, he has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.
Youmin Xi

Youmin Xi

Youmin Xi was appointed Executive President of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of University of Liverpool in Aug. 2008. He was born in 1957 and received his B.S.c in Physics in 1982, and M.E. in system engineering in 1984. In 1987 he was the first awarded Doctor degree in the field of management engineering in mainland China. As a visiting professor, he has conducted joint research projects and discourses in universities in Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. His research and teaching areas cover strategic management and policy analysis, decision-making and decision support system, management behavior and firm theory, etc. He put forwarded a theory: Harmony Theory in 1987 and extended it to HeXie Management Theory. He has successfully supervised over 100 Master and PhD students and gained many important research funds from NSFC and central and local governments as well as industrial sector. As author or co-author, he has published more than 300 academic papers and 20 books. He has received over 10 prizes at provincial or ministerial or national levels and was awarded National Young and Middle Age Experts with Distinguished Contributions, Prize of Science and Technology for Chinese Youth as well as Prize for Chinese Young Scientists etc.