Field Of Cybernetics Research Articles

Fuzzy sets in aircraft system efficiency evaluation

Purpose In the era of common digitalization and far reaching progress in the field of cybernetics, it is necessary to use the knowledge and experience in military cybernetics applications. In the field of machines, control fuzzy expert inference systems open new horizons and possibilities. Generally, the main affect of human efforts in the case of artificial intelligence is to create a machine with a set of behaviors and attitudes that would allow it to work independently, with ability to adjust to changing environmental conditions and an advisory role in the decision-making process. It should be noted that this technology used in some cases has already produced successful results. This paper aims to describe how the fuzzy expert inference membership function shapes influence analysis on selected air tasks efficiency evaluation results. Presented results prove that proper fuzzy membership functions shape selection has fundamental influence on aircraft system level of efficiency evaluation (its calculation accuracy). Using this technology in military aviation air tasks efficiency evaluation aspects is pioneer.

Proto-cybernetics in the Stanislavski System of acting

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the cybernetics community at large to the remarkably prescient work of nineteenth century theatrical pioneer Konstantin Stanislavski whose revolutionary System of Acting has, thus far, been largely overlooked in cybernetic literature and to suggest potential paths of future research in this vein. Design/methodology/approach – Close reading, analysis, and comparison of key excerpts from Stanislavski’s corpus, the writings of later proponents of his System, the literature of early cybernetics, and contemporary scholarship in cognitive science. Also, description of current and potential future applications of the theories presented. Findings – Stanislavski’s success in formulating an approach to acting capable of generating performances of previously unrealized naturalness and believability lay in his utilization of heuristics later to be taken up, under different nomenclature, by the field of cybernetics and substantiated by contemporary cognitive science....

The Next Macy Conference: A New Interdisciplinary Synthesis [Keynote

Reports on the significance of the Macy Conferences in the field of cybernetics. These were a series of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held in New York from 1941 through 1960. The aim of the Macys was not to exterminate modern science but to set alongside it another way of understanding the world, one centered on unknowability instead of knowability. If we could reproduce this doubling of perspectives, we could come at this problem or that from two angles rather than our usual one. And, very importantly, different patterns of action hang together with different patterns of understanding.

Decisions and Dynamics: Postwar Theoretical Problems and the MIT Style of Economics

This article examines certain issues in postwar economic theory and compares them with related issues in the nascent fields of cybernetics, industrial dynamics, and operations research. Because all these fields had close connections to MIT, the comparison provides an opportunity to assess to what degree a peculiar MIT “style” of economics, developed particularly by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, could be attributed to the MIT context, and to what degree this style developed in dialogue with a larger conversation taking place in and around the American economic profession as a whole. It is concluded that there were significant affinities in theoretical interest running between MIT economics and other fields at MIT, which revolved around the emergence of macro-scale phenomena out of the dynamic interplay of local decision-making processes. However, the methodology through which Samuelson and Solow, in particular, addressed these issues was peculiar to economic discourse.

A Case for Science of Social Cybernetics

This paper presents a proposal for redefining cybernetics and evolves ‘Social Cybernetics’ as a separate field of scientific study. The inspiration for such an attempt at consolidation comes from nearly forty consultancy projects involving administrative, academic, industrial, government, banking and such systems over the last 20 years of association with Tata Consultancy Services, Bombay, India by the Authors. These were large and complex systems. The cybernetic approach through relational diagrams and hierarchical separations yielded many positive results. The paper builds case for a new approach and theory to the problem of cybernetics of complex adaptive systems like social and biological systems, particularly the former. The paper broadly reviews the field of cybernetics, as dealt by Norbert Weiner, Heinz Von Foerster, Felix Geyer etc., the first and second order cybernetics and goes on to present the, principles of cognition between the observer and observed, the evolving science of complexity for better understanding of the second order cybernetics. The paper presents four types of interaction according to Indian philosophical theory of cognition and relates to the first and second order cybernetics. The basic premise and postulates of cybernetics are being presented along with a new definition for “cybernetics” and a case illustration for social cybernetics.

Analysis of worldwide research in the field of cybernetics during 1997-2011.

The study provides an overview of the research activity carried out in the field of cybernetics. To do so, all research papers from 1997 to 2011 (16,445 research papers) under the category of "Computer Science, Cybernetics" of Web of Science have been processed using our in-house software which is developed specifically for this purpose. Among its multiple capabilities, this software analyses individual and compound keywords, quantifies productivity taking into account the work distribution, estimates the impact of each article and determines the collaborations established at different scales. Keywords analysis identifies the evolution of the most important research topics in the field of cybernetics and their specificity in biological aspects, as well as the research topics with lesser interest. The analysis of productivity, impact and collaborations provides a framework to assess research activity in a specific and realistic context. The geographical and institutional distribution of publications reveals the leading countries and research centres, analysing their relation to main research journals. Moreover, collaborations analysis reveals great differences in terms of internationalization and complexity of research networks. The results of this study may be very useful for the characterization and the decisions made by research in the field of cybernetics.

Steering the future. The emergence of “Western” futures research and its production of expertise, 1950s to early 1970s

This article deals with the emergence of Futures Research after 1945 and its production of future expertise. The field of futures research (or futures studies/futurology) was conceptualised in a process of circulating knowledge in Western Europe and the USA during the 1950s and 1960s. These approaches to thinking about, forecasting and planning the future drew their arsenal of new methods largely from the field of cybernetics (such as Systems Analysis). What is more, futures research produced expertise for policy development and strategic planning. As a result of the dynamic changes in science and technology and the breakthrough of Keynesianism, the 1960s symbolized the high time of political planning in Western Europe and the USA. The paper aims to analyse the forms and character of future expertise utilized in government and administration during the 1960s. It will focus on West German futures research and its advisory role for the Federal Government but will also take transnational transfers of knowledge and comparative aspects into account. The paper will show that major strands of futures research of the 1960s were explicitly confident that they would be able to plan and control the future by using “modern” and rational methods. This led partly to a euphoria of steering. In the early 1970s, however, this confidence was shattered. One reason for this were dramatic problems in utilizing future expertise in government.

Paolo Soleri and the aesthetics of irreversibility

This essay examines the designs and writings of the architect Paolo Soleri in the context of technologically oriented post-war architectural discourse. It seeks to demonstrate that not only was Soleri aware of the ideas gleaned by his contemporaries from the fields of cybernetics, systems theory and ecology, but that he had assimilated them to his own philosophy about the built environment as an evolutionary mechanism. Within that framework, aesthetics and the material nature of form became central to his thinking, but also became the aspects of his work that marginalised him vis a vis the architectural vanguard of the 1960s and 1970s. But the systems within which Soleri inscribed architectural form were very much in line with the new models of science and aesthetics being elaborated in the decades following the Second World War, and can be understood as part of a lineage of alternative materialist thought, including the work of Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Ilya Prigogine and Gilles Deleuze.1 ‘Form follows function’ is a planetary lie. Paolo Soleri.2

Aspects of Teaching Economics for Students of Informatics

The rapid and steady changes in a field of information and communication technologies have increased demand for high qualified specialists not only in a field of cybernetics and applied informatics, but also in related fields such as economy and management. This burning request of this specific area of the labour market has increased a need for a graduate who possesses interdisciplinary knowledge. This phenomenon considers the universities, as the providers of high qualitative education, as the key factor in this relation. This paper raises the question of a role of education in this process and discusses the approaches to the methodology of teaching economics for IT students outgoing from theoretical and also practical knowledge and experience.

Living in a time of change

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a vision for the future development of Kybernetes under a new editorship.Design/methodology/approachThe new Editors are introduced, the strengths and history of the journal reviewed, and plans for its future development described.FindingsThe future of Kybernetes will build on its long and distinguished heritage, noting especially the strengths of interdisplinarity, internationality, and strong links with major cybernetic societies across the world. While maintaining these strengths, the new Editors will seek to develop further the conversations between diverse fields contributing to the journal and to bring a new emphasis to the interdisciplinary study of information, to studies of the social implications of cybernetics and related fields, and to profiles of thinkers in cybernetics, systems and management science.Originality/valueThis is only the second time that there has been a change of editor in the more than 40 years that Kybernetes has been published. The journal (and the whole field of cybernetics and systems) owes the past editors a great debt of thanks for their outstanding work, but the time has come for change. This paper starts to identify new directions under the new Editors.

Rewriting Theory: From Autopoiesis to Communication

This paper analyzes the causes and motives for the transition to a communication-based theory of social systems in the late work of Niklas Luhmann. In the first part of this paper, I present a brief sketch of advances in the field of cybernetics and systems research. I give special attention to some basic concepts introduced by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela: autopoiesis, organizational closure and enaction. In the second part, I discuss how these ideas may contribute to a ‘conceptual revolution’ in the social and behavioral sciences. In the late work of Niklas Luhmann, attempts to incorporate the idea of autopoiesis in his own social theory resulted in the preference for a communication-based, instead of an action-based, theory of social systems. Moreover, given the current transition to the information age or the knowledge society, it can also be argued that structural changes in society nowadays favor the rise of a communication-based theory of social systems. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Socio-Temporary in Architecture

The temporary in architecture is a state of territorial instability that emerges out of interactions between transdisciplinary narratives and architectural theory and its practice. This article extends this notion to the socio-temporary, which is a state arising from constant synergies between the social context and worldmaking. Such narratives were originally influenced by the field of cybernetics and later on by second-order cybernetics reflected in the emergent participatory art practice of the mid-twentieth century through transdisciplinary research. Derived from the theoretical underpinning of this article a simulation is exhibited, which illustrates theoretically elements of Varela and Maturana’s autopoietic system behaviour and its close relation to temporality in the worldmaking of architecture. This is a theoretical article – with an element of practice – that seeks to highlight the temporality of the process of worldmaking in architecture.

Suggesting the Unstable: A Textile Architecture

This article discusses the idea of a motile architecture. By taking as its starting point the new developments in the technical textiles field, the article discusses textiles as a material interface to an architecture of action. Using smart materials to embed the potential for sensing and actuation into the surfaces of the built environment itself, this article seeks to discover how a motile architecture can be conceived, designed, and realized. The article reflects on two projects by the authors: Breathing Room and Slow Furl, and develops a conceptual framework by which the key terms of material interaction can be discussed. Imagined as probes, the projects are test pieces that query the conceptual and technological basis of textile architectures. Referencing the fields of cybernetics, the aim is to develop an understanding of technology not as a posterior implantation but as a fully integrated part of the built environment. The article presents technologies by which textile design can become a model for integrating sensing and actuation into the fabric of architecture. It asks what happens when architecture seeks to engage the moving and the active? How can its motility and behavior be configured and how do we as inhabitants find our position with this behavioral place?

Law of requisite variety: a case of IT and business alignment

This paper provides an explanation of the increasing complexity of corporate IT management as a special case of application of the law of requisite variety. Frequently cited drawback of established frameworks of IT best practices like COBIT and ITIL is their complexity and related difficulty in their implementation. Through the perspective of the law of requisite variety, drawn from the field of cybernetics, we can take a more elaborated approach to this phenomenon. First, through mapping the domain of corporate IT management to the concepts from cybernetics, we ground this area in set of well defined terms. The aim of this paper is to promote the perspective, that problems with increasing complexity in IT management are directly traceable to the encompassing business environment.

Gordon Pask: exchanges between cybernetics and architecture and the envisioning of the IE

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to study a series of exchanges between cybernetics and the arts, focusing on Pask's lifelong envisioning of the so‐called information environment (I.E). It follows the author's previous PhD dissertation which was concerned with the exchanges between systems research and architecture; Gordon Pask et al.; and a couple of outstanding architectural projects related to systems and computation.Design/methodology/approachThis paper was mainly supported by archival research of Gordon Pask's Archive (held at the time by his daughter) and Cedric Price's Archive (held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture); supplemented with interviews and bibliographical research (research was made possible by a FCT grant – POCI 2010).FindingsThe paper details and discusses exchanges between the fields of cybernetics and the arts; and it focuses on Pask's lifelong exchange with architecture and the manifestation of his ideas in this field. One highlights, among others, Pask's exchanges within the British milieu and the AMG during the 1960s and 1970s; the seminal manifestations of his main C2 achievement – the Conversation Theory – in the field of architecture; and his later architectural performance.Research limitations/implicationsThe previous primary archival research conducted at Pask's daughter house, is being expanded by the author through use of new material.Originality/valueThis paper is intended for historians of sciences and the arts. It briefly overviews Pask's well‐known main works and, in addition, it includes reference to some rare little‐known materials.

Viability as a basis for performance measurement

PurposeThe paper sets out to apply the concepts of cybernetics and the control of probabilistic systems to the issue of performance measurement within organizations.Design/methodology/approachConventional approaches to Performance Measurement have been based on a mechanistic “target‐plan‐variance” model that was introduced into mainstream management practice in the 1950s. It has been subject to criticism from within both the academic and practitioners community over the last 50 years but has proved remarkably resistant to change. Systems ideas, particularly those emanating in the field of cybernetics, have not been successfully applied in this field because, it is argued, the concepts have been misunderstood and falsely blamed for the perceived failings of conventional practice.FindingsThe paper identifies the shortcomings in “tradition” approaches to performance measurement in organizations and demonstrates how the application of cybernetics concepts can address these shortcomings.Originality/valueContrary to received wisdom in parts of the academic community, cybernetics potentially provides the intellectual building‐blocks for a new paradigm, based on a fundamental appreciation of what is required to manage the interdependencies between an organization and its environment and between its constituent parts. It holds the promise of developing a set of practice that is not only more efficient and effective as a control philosophy, but also more sensitive to the human need for self‐determination in the workplace.

The Network Inside Out (review)

Reviewed by: The Network Inside Out Teresia K Teaiwa The Network Inside Out, by Annelise Riles. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. ISBN 0-472-08832-7, xxiii + 242 pages, tables, figures, maps, photographs, orthography and abbrevations, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, US$26.95. It feels terribly redundant trying to review a book that concludes that the present conditions of globalization and transnationalism have left no further room for analysis to expand (184 ). To whit: "The insights of anthropological studies of globalization often seem oddly anticipated by the subjects of transnational ethnographic enquiry themselves. . . . Anthropological analysis is reduced to restatement, to repetition, to generating reflexive modernity's 'doubles'" (5 ). This award-winning ethnography attempts to resist the temptations of an anthropology struggling to come to terms with familiar, almost universal phenomena (such as bureaucratic and institutional practices) and subjects that are themselves engaged in analysis that mirrors that of social scientists. "Thick description" then becomes appropriate only in ethnographies of the unfamiliar (an increasingly scarce commodity). For author Annelise Riles, "when phenomena are too well known to be described, what is needed is not greater detail but a selective erasure thereof, as, for example, the abstractions of modern art have brought modernity itself into view" (18 ). This review endeavors to honor the content of the form and the form of the content at hand by focusing on the most salient aspects of the text rather than attempting to provide an exhaustive account of it. Riles is an associate professor at Northwestern School of Law and a research fellow with the American Bar Association. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in Fiji and with Fiji nongovernmental organizations ( NGOs) at international meetings between 1994 and 1995, her book was awarded the Certificate of Merit of the American Society for International Law in 2001. She frames her interdisciplinary interests in the following terms: "How I might make the ending points of legal knowledge—the puzzles, frustrations, facts, and commitments the theory and practice of law entailed—beginning points for anthropological reflection and vice versa" (xii). "Yet what is one to make of a subject, such as the international institutional practices considered in this book, that one encounters already analyzed? How might one transform this kind of ending into a beginning point of one's own?" (xiv) Riles's beginning point is "the Network," a concept that she traces back to J A Barnes's founding of social network analysis in 1954, and one that subsequently influenced the anthropology of Gregory Bateson and the fields of cybernetics and "cyborgology" (62 ). For Riles, "the Network" is "a set of institutions, knowledge practices, and artifacts thereof that internally generate the effects of their own reality by reflecting on themselves. . . . Indeed, for those concerned with the intersection of modernist [End Page 443] epistemologies and liberal political philosophies, the Network offers a poignant case study of institutionalized utopianism, an ambition for political change through communication and information exchange, of universalism after cultural relativism and the 'incredulity toward the metanarrative' ([Jean-François] Lyotard [The Postmodern Condition,] 1984 ). In the Beijing Conference and the networks it spawned, we have an opportunity to explore one highly reflexive elaboration of a modernist epistemology and radical neoliberal political vision, albeit one defined by its refusal of particularity, that is, by its own universalizing claims" (3 ). In The Network Inside Out, Riles has produced what is perhaps the first-ever ethnography of women's nongovernmental organizations in Fiji, and the first-ever study to use the case of a rural part-European family community in Fiji for comparative purposes. What makes both groups seem familiar is their simultaneous deployment of and enunciation by discourses of modernity. Women's organizations—such as (the now-defunct) PAWORNET (Pacific Women's Regional Information/Communication Network), Women in Politics, National Council of Women, and others in Fiji—have recourse (however superficial) to the tools of social science analysis, take a legalistic approach to language, and pay inordinate attention to issues of design and aesthetics in the organization of information for the purported purpose of its infinite (and ultimately liberating) expansion. In contrast, Riles finds that members of the Whippy family (descendants of early American settler...

Organising South African industry-university partnership programmes for viability

South Africa experiences a great need for science, engineering and technology skills. As a counter strategy to the growing skills need local government, industries and universities have entered Industry-University Partnership Programme (IUPP) agreements following the example of international counterparts. Currently a few such programmes exist in the South African context. The organisation of these programmes has however proven to be a difficult and challenging task. This article purposes to propose a model for organising industry-university partnership programmes for viability. The proposed model draws on the work of Stafford Beer in his Viable System Model (Clemson 1984). The research paradigm stems from the fields of cybernetics and system thinking. The IUPP concept is in line with the societal shift of power (the ability to maintain control over use and allocation of crucial life-sustaining resources) from control over land and resources to knowledge, technological competence and human innovation (IFR 1998). South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.15(3) 2001: 24-31

The Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science: A Review Essay of Mind As Motion

Sometimes it is hard to know precisely what to think about the Dynamical Hypothesis (hereafter, DH), the new kid on the block in cognitive science and described succinctly by the slogan "cognitive agents are dynamical systems" (Van Gelder, 1998). Is the DH a radically new approach to understanding human cognition? (No.) Is it providing deep insights that traditional symbolic artificial intelligence overlooked? (Certainly.) Is it providing deep insights that recurrent connectionist models, circa 1990, had overlooked? (Probably not.) Is time, as instantiated in the DH, necessary to our understanding of cognition? (Certainly.) Is time, as instantiated in the DH, sufficient for understanding cognition? (Certainly not.) The DH is often touted as being a revolutionary alternative to the traditional Physical Symbol System Hypothesis (PSSH, renamed in Mind As Motion, the Computational Hypothesis) (Newell and Simon, 1976) that was the bedrock of artificial intelligence for 25 years. We disagree. First, as pointed out by the authors themselves, the use of dynamics as a framework to comprehend the brain and cognition is not new. In the early 1950’s, for example, W. Ross Ashby wrote a wonderful little treatise called Design for a Brain (1952) based on the recurrent, dynamical nature of the brain. The whole field of cybernetics (Wiener, 1948), developed during the late 1940’s, was also deeply concerned with feedback and stability in complex evolving systems. The explicit goal of these authors and others was to develop a general framework within which biological and cognitive systems could be studied and understood. These efforts, while vision in scope, did not bear fruit, in part because the systems they hoped to understand – in particular, human brain function and cognitive activities – were extraordinarily complex and there were no realistic means of empirically testing the ‘hypotheses’ generated by this approach to cognition.

Obituary

On September 2 1996, Professor Edmond Nicolau, an eminent cybernetician and great intellect, died aged 74. This was, indeed, a great loss to the world of science. I have also lost a devoted friend and active collaborator in the fields of cybernetics and systems, as well as a valuable member of the Editorial Board of Robotica.