UK Cybernetics Society 40th Anniversary Annual Conference

Citation

(2009), "UK Cybernetics Society 40th Anniversary Annual Conference", Kybernetes, Vol. 38 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2009.06738aac.002

UK Cybernetics Society 40th Anniversary Annual Conference

Article Type: Conference reports From: Kybernetes, Volume 38, Issue 1/2

The conference was held on Saturday 20 September 2008 in the Council Room of King’s College, London, and was a successful event with a varied programme. There were eight presentations in all, four in the morning and four in the afternoon. There was no admission charge and the event was well attended with about 30 participants. It marked the 40th Anniversary of the Founding of the Society in 1968.

As for the 2006 conference, reported in Kybernetes, 36/1, 2007, pp. 118-21, the preliminary arrangements were admirable, with biographical notes and photographs, as well as links to relevant websites, shown on the Society’s web site at: www.cybsoc.org for all eight speakers. There are also useful abstracts of three of the presentations.

The first talk was billed as being by Jasia Reichardt, Deputy Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and organizer of the acclaimed Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition there in 1968. She was unable to attend and the presentation was by Nick Wadley, former Head of Art History at Chelsea School of Art. The title was: “Cybernetic Serendipity: Living with Machines”.

The talk was very well illustrated with PowerPoint images and was both entertaining and thought-provoking in its exploration of the relationship between people, technology and art. A comparison was made between the way human requirements have been met by traditional means and how they are now met by the internet, mobile phones, television and so on. Exhibits at Cybernetic Serendipity were described with special reference to robots. Several of these were able to interact with their audience, the most elaborate being the Musicolour display developed by Gordon Pask. One that attracted much attention was the SAM, or sound activated mobile, devised by Edward Ihnatowicz, which was like a flower-head on a flexible stalk, able to bend as though to listen to sounds. (SAM was described at the 2006 Annual Conference by Dr Alex Zivanovic – see the above reference.) The final slide of the presentation showed Alice emerging through a looking-glass into the modern technological world, with the question: “Will she ever return?”

The second presentation was by Dr George Mallen, a former Collaborator of Gordon Pask and now Founder and Chairman of System Simulation Ltd, a company specialising in the development of software for large multimedia repositories. His topic was: “The Evolution of Knowledge and Knowledge Systems”. He discussed the biological evolution of the means of acquiring and using knowledge, making a distinction between belief and knowledge, where the former is uncertain but used to make necessary quick decisions, for instance in avoiding predators, and the latter is more carefully compiled. (It is possible to quibble here and to suggest that both should be termed “belief” but with differing degrees of confidence.) Emphasis was placed on the spread of knowledge by imitation, for which an apparent neural basis is in the “mirror” areas of primate brains. These have been found to show activity associated with particular actions, irrespective of whether the action is performed by the subject or observed when performed by another individual. He discussed how this would lead to tool-making and externalisation of perception, and associated McCulloch’s “Redundancy of Potential Command” with construction of interactive databases.

The third presentation had a different flavour, and was by Dr Lance Nizami, who had flown from America at his own expense to contribute. His title was: “The Misapplication of Shannon’s Information Theory to Humans” and he referred to a paper published in 1951 which not only embodied the misapplication but has been accepted uncritically as a model for much subsequent work. The type of experiment in question involves testing the ability of a subject to discriminate different levels of a stimulus, where the number of levels may be from three to twenty. The criticised paper uses Shannon’s treatment of a “confusion matrix” to estimate a channel capacity, but it was argued that since a main cause of error is decay of the subject’s memory of the distinctions this is not valid. The criticism was supported by mathematics and by reference to experimental results. A startling assertion by the speaker was that a paper embodying his criticism would not be accepted by a psychological journal because results on which the reputations of referees are founded would be called into question.

This reflection on attitudes of the scientific “establishment” produced a sympathetic response from the next speaker, Dr John C. Williamson of Glasgow University and formerly of CERN and Philips Research Laboratories. He quoted a view that science is in a dark age because people have become used to accepting theories without understanding them, so that critical appraisal is diminished. In his paper entitled: “On the Nature of the Electron” he presented a theory of the fundamentals of electromagnetism and atomic physics that could be an alternative to String Theory. He began by referring to the interaction of an electron and a positron in which their mutual annihilation produces a pair of photons, and the reverse process in which photons give rise to an electron-positron pair. A novel explanation of this depends on viewing the electron as something in the nature of light curled into a vortex. A great deal more has been worked out with reference to quarks and spin, and support is given to principles of both uncertainty and exclusion.

The first paper in the afternoon was by Professor Jack Cohen of Warwick Mathematical Institute, with the title: “Biosemiotics”. This refers to the signs or forms of communication that are important in biological processes, and hence to communication between cells in morphogenesis as well as to neural and hormonal and various other forms of communication. The speaker did not treat the mechanics of any of these but was more concerned with history of the abandonment of a dualist philosophy, where mind and body are held to be distinct, and adoption of the monist alternative implicit in cybernetics. He referred to writings of Aristotle, certain of which advanced a monist view. These ones were, however, lost to the Christian world when Rome fell, although they survived in Arabic translation in the Islamic one. The claim was that cybernetics would probably have appeared much sooner, probably with Descartes, had these writings been known in Europe in his time.

The next paper was by Professor Maurice Yolles, of Liverpool John Moores University, Vice-President for Research and Publications of the International Society for Systems Science. His title was: “Knowledge Cybernetics”. This was a complex presentation that I will not try to summarise. (A book by Yolles, Organizations as Complex Systems: An Introduction to Knowledge Cybernetics, is reviewed very briefly in Kybernetes, 36/1, 2007, pp. 122-3, and at greater length but inadequately in Kybernetes, Vol. 36 No. 5/6, 2007, pp. 822-4, and a further review is in preparation.) Several of the slides shown in the presentation had blocks labelled, respectively, as existential, nuomenal and phenomenal domains (as in one of the figures in: Yolles et al, “Toward a formal theory of socioculture: a yin-yang information-based theory of social change”, Kybernetes, 37/7, 2008, pp. 850-909) with arrowed paths connecting them. Some of the paths were marked to indicate that cessation of their effectiveness corresponded to a system pathology.

There were two more papers in the second part of the afternoon, both of them usefully summarised on the web site. The first was by Oleg Liber, Professor of e-Learning and Director of the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at Bolton University. His title was: “The Application of the Viable System Model to the Design of Personal Learning Environments”. He gave a valuable overview of education in British schools and universities, especially the latter, though he referred to a current crisis in schools associated with a high rate of truancy. He used Beer’s model to consider the work of universities, with the observation that there is ambiguity since a student can be alternatively seen as a customer and as a product. Traditional educational strategies, with compartmentalisation of subject-areas, can be seen as a means of managing complexity, but with shortcomings in for instance allowing no place for polymaths.

It was argued that the coming of the internet has completely altered the situation and that universities should build on this and become facilitators of self-organised learning, and hence the personal learning environments of the title.

The final presentation was by Dr Bernard Scott, Head of the Flexible Learning Support Centre, Cranfield University, Defence College of Management and Technology. He is also a former collaborator of Gordon Pask in the development of Conversation Theory, and Past-President of the very active RC51 (Research Committee 51, on Sociocybernetics) of the International Sociological Association. His topic was: “The Role of Sociocybernetics in Understanding World Futures”. He claimed that sociocybernetics offers valuable holistic means for tackling vital world problems, and mentioned increasing inequality of wealth, and degradation of the environment as examples. He broached the unpopular topic of limitation of world population, with the observation that, to provide all of the present one with the living standard customary in Europe and North America, the produce of five planets would be needed. He was hopeful that a birth rate reduction could be achieved without draconian measures.

These notes are of course sketchy and do not do justice to the full presentations. The Chairman of the Society, Professor Martin Smith, is to be congratulated on putting together the rich and varied programme, as is also Nick Green for the web site presentation.

Alex M. Andrew