We are in the process of establishing a board of international advisors for this conference. The following is a still incomplete list and more details about the international advisors will be published here soon.
Edith K. Ackermann is an Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology from the University of Aix-Marseille, France; a Visiting Scientist at the MIT School of Architecture; and a Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in Cambridge, MA. Previously Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media laboratory, Edith started her professional life in Geneva, Switzerland, where she worked as a Scientific Collaborator at the Centre International d’Epistémologie Génétique, under the direction of Jean Piaget, and as a Researcher / Junior Faculty in the “Groupe Stratégies” (Study Group on the “meanderings of individual minds in-situ”), under the direction of Baerbel Inhelder and Guy Céllérier. She earned a Doctor of Developmental Psychology [Com Laude]; two Master’s degrees in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Psychology; and a Bachelor of Experimental Psychology degree, all from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. |
Roy Ascott is an artist with a cybernetic, technoetic, and syncretic approach to practice and theory. Recent retrospectives of his work have been shown at Plymouth Arts Centre, UK, SPACE in Hackney, London, and at INDAF, Incheon, Korea. Roy Ascott: Syncretic Cybernetics was part of the Shanghai Biennale 2012. He is Founding President of the Planetary Collegium, Plymouth University, and is the DeTao Master of Technoetic Arts at DTMA, Shanghai. Head of the radical Ealing Groundcourse in the early 1960s, he has been President of Ontario College of Art, Toronto; Vice-President of San Francisco Art Institute, California; Professor of Communications Theory, University of Applied Arts, Vienna; and Professor of Interactive Arts, University of Wales. His books are translated into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. He has lectured and published in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Australia. |
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 between he accomplished a research project on risk management in banking, was visiting scholar at Stanford University, California in 1990/91, and lecturer at University Witten/Herdecke from 1991 to 1996. From 1993 to 1996 he received a Heisenberg grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 1994 he was academic visitor at the Department for Accounting and Finance of London School of Economics and Political Sciences. From 1995 to 1997 he was visiting professor at the Department of Sociology at Vienna University. 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 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), coeditor of the yearbook Revue für Postheroisches Management (2007–12), board member of the journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing. Visiting professor at University of Vienna (1995–1997), at University of Basel (2009–2011), and at Ashkal Alwan Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (November 2012). Areas of Interest: sociological theory, culture theory, economic sociology, organization research, and management education. Internet: www.zu.de/baecker and catjects.wordpress.com. |
Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer and cultural anthropologist. She lives in New Hampshire, and is a visiting scholar at Boston College’s Center on Aging and Work. She attended Radcliffe College (BA 1960) and Harvard (PhD 1963). From 1987 to 2002, Bateson was Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University, becoming Professor Emerita in 2002. She then spent three years as Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has also taught at Northeastern University and Spelman College and abroad in the Philippines and Iran. Bateson’s original research interest was in linguistics and the Middle East. More recently she has been interested in adaptation to culture change, which has led her to work with life histories. Her interest in cybernetics started with her memoir on her parents, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye, but has continued in relation to issues of learning, conflict resolution, and environmental disruption. She has authored or coauthored ten books, most recently Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery, 2004, and Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom, 2010. |
Margaret A. Boden OBE ScD FBA is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, where she helped develop the world’s first academic programme in AI and cognitive science. She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology (as well as a Cambridge ScD and three honorary doctorates), and integrates these disciplines with AI in her research, which has been translated into twenty languages. In 2013 she was awarded the Covey Prize for outstanding research in computing and philosophy by IACAP. Her recent books include The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms; Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science; and Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise. She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Brighton. |
Mark Burry has published internationally on three main themes: the life and work of the architect Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, putting theory into practice with regard to ‘challenging’ architecture, and transdisciplinary design education and practice. He has also published widely on broader issues of design, construction and the use of computers in design theory and practice. Professor Mark Burry is the founding Director of RMIT University’s Design Research Institute (DRI). DRI positions design research’s role as an ‘explorer and tester of design options’ focusing on the challenges of urbanisation and growing cities of the Future. The Institute contributes to an understanding of the value of design and the role of design research among diverse communities and audiences. DRI was established in 2008. As founding Director of RMIT’s state-of-the-art Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) in 2001 he led the establishment of a holistic spatial design research environment dedicated to almost all aspects of contemporary spatial design activity. The laboratory has a design-practice postgraduate research emphasis and acts as a creative think-tank accessible to both local and international practices, including ARUP in Melbourne and London, dECOi in Paris and Gehry Partners in Los Angeles. Since 1979, Professor Burry has been a Principal Architect with the design team Sagrada Família Basilica based on site in Barcelona. For over three decades he has been helping untangle the mysteries of Gaudí’s compositional strategies for his greatest work, especially those strategies coming from his later years, the implications of which only become fully apparent as they continue to be resolved for building purposes. |
William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, Nevada, has variously been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He has published fifteen books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. Fox has researched and written books set in the Antarctic, the Arctic, and the deserts of Chile, Australia, and the United States. He is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and Explorers Club, and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. He has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, the Australian National University, and National Museum of Australia. |
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. 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. |
Rom Harré was for many years Lecturer in Philosophy of Science at Oxford University and is Fellow Emeritus of Linacre College. His career has moved from chemical engineering to mathematics to philosophy to psychology. Currently he is Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University, Washington DC. His most recent books include Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrodinger’s Cat and Psychology for the Third Millennium with F. M. Moghaddam. |
Richard Jung studied agriculture, anthropology, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion and sociology in Czechoslovakia, England, Finland, France, Norway and the USA. He has a doctorate in Law from Charles and in Social Relations from Harvard Universities. He consulted and did research i.a. for the Boston Psychopathic Hospital (now Massachusetts Mental Health Center), IBM, NASA, Odd Nansen (when he was the UN Commissioner for Refugees), and the United Planning Organization of the National Capital Area, Washington DC. He has taught communication, comparative animal behavior, cybernetics, political science, psychology and sociology at various universities, among them Alberta, Amsterdam, Augsburg, Brunel, Charles, Columbia, Cornell, Duisburg, El Colegio de Mexico, Hawaii, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Vassar. While a member of Sociology and the Center for Advanced Studies in Theoretical Psychology at the University of Alberta he also founded and directed there the Center for Systems Research; at the Technical University in Prague he was President of the Center for Advanced Study. His “Experience and Action: Selected Items in Systems Theory” appeared in edition echoraum, Vienna 2007. |
Kalevi Kull is Professor of Biosemiotics in the University of Tartu, Estonia. He has studied biology and worked in theoretical and mathematical biology as well as in experimental ecology, and during the last 20 years in semiotics. He is the Head of the Department of Semiotics of Tartu University which is currently one of leading semiotics institutions in the world. His research deals with semiotic approach in biology, semiotic mechanisms of biodiversity, and theory and history of semiotics. He has edited the volume Jakob von Uexküll: A Paradigm for Biology and Semiotics, coedited (with Claus Emmeche) the book Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the action of Signs, a.o. He is book series coeditor (with Paul Cobley) of Semiotics, Communication, Cognition (De Gruyter Mouton), and a coeditor of the journals Sign Systems Studies and Biosemiotics. |
Alexander Laszlo, Ph.D., is Founder and President of Syntony Quest, former Director of the Doctoral Program in Management at the Graduate School of Business Administration & Leadership (ITESM), Mexico, and President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS). As Professor of Systems Science and Evolutionary Development, he currently teaches at a variety of MBA and Doctoral programs internationally and is Core Faculty in the Organization Systems Renewal program at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. He has worked for UNESCO, the Italian Electric Power Agency, and the U.S. Department of Education, has held visiting appointments with the London School of Economics and the European University Institute, and has been named a Level I Member of the National Research Academy of Mexico (SNI). He is on the Editorial Boards of four internationally arbitered research journals, recipient of the Gertrude Albert Heller Award, the Sir Geoffrey Vickers Memorial Award, and the Förderpreis Akademischer Klub award, author of over sixty journal, book, and encyclopedia publications, and a 5th Degree Black Belt of traditional Korean Karate. . |
Loet Leydesdorff (Ph.D. Sociology, M.A. Philosophy, and M.Sc. Biochemistry) is Professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) of the University of Amsterdam. He is Visiting Professor of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) in Beijing and Honorary Fellow of the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) of the University of Sussex. He has published extensively in systems theory, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation (see list of publications). With Henry Etzkowitz, he initiated a series of workshops, conferences, and special issues about the Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations. He received the Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics and Informetrics in 2003 and held “The City of Lausanne” Honor Chair at the School of Economics, Université de Lausanne, in 2005. In 2007, he was Vice-President of the 8th International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems (CASYS’07, Liège). |
Javier Livas born in Monterrey, Mexico on June 7, 1946. Son of the former Governor of Nuevo León state, Mr. Eduardo Livas and Mrs. Idalia Cantú-Livas. Graduated as an attorney from the University of Nuevo León and got a Masters degree in Business from Monterrey Tec. Has worked as a banker and a Trust department. As practicing attorney has handled some important cases in the local scene. Expert in bankruptcy laws. Became interested in politics after studying with Stafford Beer all about Management Cybernetics. He contended in the primary election of 1993 as a candidate for the Presidency of Mexico, unsuccessfully. Has had a very long carreer as an activist for freedom, democracy, transparency and open trials procedural law. He collaborated in successful campaign of Vicente Fox Currently in the year 2000, ending the 70 year rule of the PRI party in Mexico. He is currently a member of the PAN party. Has several books published among which are “Cibernética, Estado y Derecho”, “El Estado Cibernético” also in English as THE CYBERNETIC STATE, plus El Libro del Poder Personal, (not translated yet). Another book about cybernetics and golf is called The Cybernetic Approach, not published. Is currently involved in a startup company under the name of UNIVERSAL MANAGER SYSTEM and SOFTWARE. Has several dozen videos on YOUTUBE with lessons on the Viabla System Model, Management Cybernetics, and related topics. Happily married to Alma Nora Garza-Livas, with two sons and two daughters and now 7 grandchildren. |
Tshilidzi Marwala is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor: Research, Innovation, Postgraduate Studies and the Library at the University of Johannesburg. He was the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Johannesburg. He was previously a full Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the South Africa Chair (SARChI) of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. Prior to this, he was an executive assistant to the technical director at the South African Breweries. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering (magna cum laude) from Case Western Reserve University (USA), a Master of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria, a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge University, was a post-doctoral research associate at the Imperial College (London) and completed a Program for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School. He is a registered professional engineer, a Fellow of TWAS, The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, the Academy of Science of South Africa, CSIR and the South African Academy of Engineering. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) and a distinguished member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). His research interests are multi-disciplinary and they include the applications of computational intelligence to engineering, computer science, finance, social science and medicine. He has extensive track record in human capacity development having supervised 41 Masters and 13 PhD students to completion. Some of these students have proceeded with their doctoral and post-doctoral studies at leading universities such as Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, British Columbia, Rutgers, Purdue and Concordia. He has authored/co-authored six books , over 260 papers in journals, proceedings and book chapters and hold three international patents. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Systems Science (Taylor and Francis Publishers) and was an associate editor of the South African Journal of Science. |
John Mingers is Professor of Operational Research and Systems at Kent Business School, and is also the Director of Research. His research interests include: the use of systems and cybernetic methodologies in problem situations – particularly the mixing of different methods within an intervention (multimethodology), autopoiesis, the nature of information, meaning and knowledge, research metrics and research performance, and critical management studies. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences, and an on the Editorial Board of MIS Quarterly, Systems Research and Behavioural Science and the J. of Mixed Methods Research. He has published in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, European J. of Operational Research, J. of Critical Realism, The Sociological Review, and J. for the Theory of Social Behaviour and has published four books, the latest being Realising Systems Thinking: Knowledge and Action in Management Science (Wiley). |
Joy Murray is a Senior Research Fellow with the multi-disciplinary Integrated Sustainability Analysis group in the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. She joined the group in 2003 helping to communicate their work to a global audience through articles and books. The most recent book Enough for All Forever: A handbook for learning about sustainability, includes contributions from more than 50 authors from all over the world. It was launched in Hiroshima in February. It will be followed later in the year by the launch of The Sustainability Practitioner’s Guide to Multi-Regional Input-output (MRIO) Analysis with contributions from the OECD, WTO, European Commission, APEC and the UN as well as all major MRIO research teams world-wide. Concurrent with this work Joy has managed an action learning program building leadership capacity in residents of government housing estates. In a previous life, after spending ten years at home bringing up three children and many years teaching in primary and secondary schools, she was manager of the New South Wales state government’s IT training strategy for teachers. In 2003 Joy completed her PhD: A Cybernetic View of Teacher Learning. |
Sudhakar Nadkarni has the distinction of having initiated three major Institutions in India. He was instrumental in starting the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in 1969, the department of Design at IIT Guwahati in 1997 and the design Management programme at the Werlingkar Institute of Management at Mumbai. As ethusiatic as ever, inspiring many, he has always stood for the cause of design in India. Apart from contributing to academia, he has contributed significantly in the fields of Environmental Design, Exhibition Design and Product Design. He is now the Dean of Business Design at the Werlingkar Institute of Management, Mumbai. |
Pauline Oliveros is a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ’50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones –her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi. Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960’s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. Pauline Oliveros is the founder of “Deep Listening,” which comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. Pauline Oliveros describes Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening is my life practice,” she explains, simply. Oliveros is founder of Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation. |
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. |
Lars Qvortrup is professor at the Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University (AAU), and director of LSP, Laboratory for research-based School development and Pedagogical practice (AAU and UCN). Prior to that he has been professor at University of Southern Denmark and University of Aarhus, Dean of the Danish School of Education and rector of the Royal School of Library and Information Science. Since 1983 Lars Qvortrup has written and/or edited more than 40 books in Danish or English and 230 articles in Danish and international readers and journals, including The Hypercomplex Society. Peter Lang Publishing, New York 2003, The Concept of the Network Society: Post-Ontological Reflections. Samfundslitteratur Press, Copenhagen 2007 and Remediation Revisited. Moving Media Studies. Samfundslitteratur Press, Copenhagen 2007. He is a member of the editorial board of three peer review journals: Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Seminar.net and Paideia. Journal for applied school research. |
Peg Rawes is Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of Research, Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. Her teaching and research focuses on aesthetic, material, technical, biopolitical and ecological theories of spatiotemporality and subjectivity. Most recently she has edited two collections of work by international researchers from architecture, the visual arts, philosophy, medicine, law, anthropology and the humanities; Architectural Relational Ecologies (June 2013) which examines sustainability through cultural, political and philosophical ideas about sex, biology and nature; and Poetic Biopolitics (forthcoming). Other publications include: Space, Geometry and Aesthetics (2008) and Irigaray for Architects (2007). Chapters in Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (2012), Designing for the 21st Century (2008), Material Matters (2007); and articles for: Interstices 13 (2012); The Senses and Society (2008), Kybernetes (2007) and the Journal of Aesthetic Education (2007). External appointments include: EAHN Journal editorial board member (2012-); AHRA steering committee member (2009-), Luce Irigaray Circle advisory board member. |
Bernard Scott graduated from Brunel University, UK, in 1968 with a first class honors degree in Psychology. He completed a Ph.D. in Cybernetics from the same university in 1976. His supervisor was Gordon Pask, with whom he worked between 1967 and 1978. Bernard is former Head of the Flexible Learning Support Centre, UK Defence Academy and former Reader in Cybernetics, Cranfield University, UK. He retired from these positions in August, 2009, and September, 2010, respectively. He now works as an independent researcher. Bernard is a Fellow and founder member of the U.K.’s Cybernetics Society. Since 2000 has served as a council member. He is an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the American Society for Cyberneticsand an Academician of the International Academy of Systems and Cybernetics Sciences. Bernard is Past President of Research Committee 51 (on Sociocybernetics) of the International Sociological Association. |
David Weinberger, Ph.D., writes about the effect of the Internet on ideas. He is a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. His latest book, “Too Big to Know” (2012), looks at the networking of knowledge and expertise. He is a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto” and is the author of “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and “Everything Is Miscellaneous.” Dr. Weinberger has been a marketing VP and adviser to high tech companies, an adviser to several presidential campaigns, and was recently a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department. He has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto. |
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, 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. |
Gerard de Zeeuw has published widely – mainly concerning matters of research design and knowledge creation. He is co-founder of the International Federation of Systems Research, the Dutch Systems Group and of various research institutions. He was elected twice as fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. At present he is senior professor of architectural design research of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Leuven, emeritus professor of complex social systems and innovation of the Faculty of Science of the Univesity of Amsterdam and visiting professor-in-waiting of research of the University of Lincoln. |
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