First International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems, CASYS '97, Liege, 11-15 August 1997

Citation

Vallée, R. (1998), "First International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems, CASYS '97, Liege, 11-15 August 1997", Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.1998.06727bab.002

First International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems, CASYS '97, Liege, 11-15 August 1997

First International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems, CASYS '97, Liege, 11-15 August 1997This conference was held from 11-15 August 1997, at HEC (Hautes Etudes Commerciales) ­ Liège (Belgium).

The Honorary President was Professor R. Rosen and the president Professor D. Dubois, Professor G. van de Vijver being vice-president. Among the federations sponsoring the congress we note: Association Internationale de Cybernétique (AIC) and the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC).

At the opening session, keynote addresses, in French or in English, were given by Professor M. Dubru, director of HEC-Liège, Professor J. Ramaekers, president of AIC, Dr J. Chandler, president of the Washington Evolutionary Systems Society, and Professor R. Vallée, director-general of the WOSC, who emphasized the following points:

The topics which will be considered here, causality and finality, emergence, chaos, formal neuronal nets, prediction, modellisation etc., are among those which WOSC has always aimed at promoting in the very line of the works of Norbert Wiener, its President in memoriam, forerunner in the domains of stationary time series and prediction, teleology reconsidered in the light of negative feedback, Brownian motion ... It seems important to me to recall that Norbert Wiener considered Leibniz as the patron saint of cybernetics while, for W.S. McCulloch, it was Descartes. In fact these sponsorships are equally legitimate. McCulloch was thinking about the intuition of Descartes concerning, in modern terms, a negative feedback present in the reflex arc. Wiener had in mind the Leibnizian concept of monad: an entity able to inform itself, build up a more or less exact image of the universe and evolve in pre-established harmony with the other monads. These two ideas rest on a fundamental aspect of cybernetics: negative feedback and information which are at the root of many processes which will be considered in this conference. I even see in the monad, able to retroact on itself, a prefiguration of what I see as an "epistemo-praxiological loop". After Wiener and McCulloch, I would like to tell a few words about Heinz von Förster, to whom WOSC presented its Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal in 1995. Initiator of the so-called second cybernetics, with emphasis put on the observational capacities of systems, his conceptions about noise, auto-organisation etc. are fundamental to this conference where knowledge and action play an essential role.

There were sessions on anticipatory systems and epistemology, systems modelling and control, autonomous systems and robotics, computational and dynamical systems, neuronal and cognitive systems, with communications from Belgium (19), France (15), USA (11), Germany (6), Japan (5), Austria (4), Great Britain (4), Portugal (4) and also (28) from Belarus, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland and Russia, the total number of participants being about 180. A plenary lecture, due to Professor E. von Glaserfeld, on "Anticipation in the constructivist theory of cognition", dealing mainly with the different aspects of causality, was read by Professor D. Dubois. Two cocktail parties and an official dinner completed the programme.

Robert Vallée