Beijing, China, 21-24 August 2010

The Bertalanffy Center is, together with other institutions, co-organiser of a conference held in Beijing, China, 21-24 August 2010. The topic is “Towards a New Science of Information”. The background of the conference is the growing movement for the founding of a transdisciplinary field dealing with different manifestations of information as object of study. Most scholars hold that this new field shall find its foundation in complex systems thinking. That’s the reason for the BCSSS to support these activities. Further details can be found here.

29 participants came from abroad and 34 from the host country, China. A core of the presentations dealt with problems of how to establish a new science of information and how to unify information concepts while many other presentations addressed specific problems. The topics covered quite an impressive range from philosophy of information and logics to complex systems to physics, bioinformation and biosemiotics, social information science and ICTs and society to informatics, media and computer science and technical applications. Proceedings will be published in triple-c. It was decided to found a new scientific society to promote the study of information and facilitate networking (“International Society for Information Studies”). The next regular conference will be held in 2012.