The law of information transformation reveals the essential of cognition, to fasten the process of information transformation for cognition body, we present the knowledge ecological tree analysis and algorithm in the paper based on factor space theory, which provides a plate of mathematical description for information ecosystem.

Information ecology is a concept relative to intelligent agents. It’s not about the ecology of information itself, but the ecological system that the intelligent agents exist as an informational way and process, produce, create information.

The information ecology consists of four levels: the level of information network is the basic level of matter and energy of information ecology; the level of information flow is the information processing level of information ecology; the level of information production is the evolution level of information ecology; and the level of information creation is the dynamic level of information ecology. Reciprocity is the radical characteristic of information ecology as well as information. The basic characteristic of natural ecology is physical; the basic characteristic of social ecology is relational; and the basic characteristic of information ecology is reciprocitical. The basic principle of information ecology development in human society is the interaction between information symmetry and asymmetry. The basic difference between information ecology and natural ecology is that the natural ecology is naturally formed, and the information ecology is basically intelligent agent-made. In the era of information civilization, information ecology is not only based on the natural ecology and social ecology, but also plays more and more important roles in natural ecology, especially in social ecology. The key to natural ecology is the natural balance; the key to social ecology is social harmony; and the key to information ecology is mutual arousing in the process of information based on information circulation.

Can it be taken for granted that humans will remain in control in a situation where a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to our no longer being the foremost creatures on our planet in terms of general intelligence? This question lies at the heart of arguments put forth in recent years by philosopher Nick Bostrom, computer scientist Stuart Russell, physicist Max Tegmark and others -- arguments that raise dire concerns about such scenarios. Others claim that such concerns are a useless (or even dangerous) distraction. I will attempt a cool-headed and balanced evaluation of whether apocalyptic AI scenarios are worth paying attention to.

This keynote will give an introduction to IEEE P7000, the first standard IEEE is ever going to publish on ethical issues in system design. As co-chair of IEEE P7000 I am going to inform the audience about what this standard will be all about.  In a nutshell: engineers, technologists and other project stakeholders need a methodology for identifying, analyzing and reconciling ethical concerns of end users at the beginning of systems and software life cycles. The purpose of IEEE P7000 is to enable the pragmatic application of this type of Value-Based System Design methodology which demonstrates that conceptual analysis of values and an extensive feasibility analysis can help to refine ethical system requirements in systems and software life cycles. It will provide engineers and technologists with an implementable process aligning innovation management processes, IS system design approaches and software engineering methods to minimize ethical risk for their organizations, stakeholders and end users. In the course of the keynote I will also show how relevant values and system design ideas can be gained from using utilitarianism, deontological ethics and virtue ethics.

The Physical Computability Thesis (PCT) states that the physical world is computable. Sometimes it is argued that a well-evidenced logical principle, the Church-Turing Thesis, entails PCT. But this reasoning is faulty. I argue that it is an open question whether PCT is true: even if the universe is finite, physics may turn out to confound PCT. What would a non-computable physics look like, and what would be the implications for scientists and engineers? I review potential countermodels to various formulations of PCT.

Although molecules like DNA can be analyzed in terms of their intrinsic information content on the basis of their structural complexity, it is their role in regulating cell metabolism and preserving genetic inheritance that is central. It is a basic tenet of cellular molecular biology that the sequence of nucleotides in a DNA polymer provides information contributing to the structure of proteins and their metabolic interactions and that DNA replication preserves and transmits this information across organism generations. In this respect one can describe DNA structures as being “about” protein structures and indirectly about cell function with respect to a probable environment. It is not merely that we as observers have made this referential assessment. It is intrinsic to cell function and evolution. But there is nothing intrinsic to nucleic acid polymers that makes them intrinsically referential. How a molecule like DNA or RNA could have acquired this property of being “about” other molecules and their interrelationships remains mysterious. 

In this presentation I will describe a molecular thought experiment that demonstrates how dynamical constraints embodied in a simple molecular system can become spontaneously offloaded onto a molecule’s structural constraints such that this structure separately preserves and re-presents the dynamical constraints that are critical for reconstituting the containing molecular system should it become disrupted. Three variants on this model system provide unambiguous examples of three canonical referential relationships that roughly correspond to iconic, indexical, and symbolic referential relationships.

This analysis can help to formalize the relationship between physical-chemical, informational, and semiotic theories of life, as well as provide clues to the origin and nature of molecular genetic information. 

Digital technology is changing society and industry, but how big is the change and how fast will it come? Can we speak of a digital revolution comparable to the industrial revolution? Does it make sense to speak of data as the new oil? Will av world with Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data be so different as to warrant the talk of a digital revolution? What are the important challenges facing us, and how do we make the most of the new technologies?

Not only we are attending to the exponential implementation of robotic platforms into several fields but also has arisen a public debate about the several challenges of this robot revolution.  Among the long list of possible debates, there is one especially important: do must robots have emotions? Beyond the classic approaches related to affective computing which help to design better Human-Robot Interactions (henceforth, HRI), the presence of emotions into robotic systems is considered in a new light. Taking into consideration artificial cognitive architectures, should emotions, or a kind of synthetic emotions, be a fundamental part of these machines? We know that emotional values and mechanisms determine and shape the whole experience and rationing human processes, and it could affect/help/modify robotic ones. From an individual or a social perspective, the emotional skills of our robots can define a new scenario for the HRI processes as well as for the internal robotic revolution.

From three different perspectives and disciplines, Anthropoogy, Engineering and Cognitive Philosophy, we will discuss these ideas in more detail, thanks to the collaborations of Lola Cañamero (University of Hertfordshire, UK), Rodolphe Gelin (Softbankrobotics, France), and Kathleen Richardson (De Montfort University, Leicester, UK).

It all started with a short report by Oxford-researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne (2013), “The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?” which was interpreted to say that in the next 20 years half of all current jobs will disappear. There will be massive unemployment and societies will have to introduce ”universal basic income” and prepare for a world with increasing divisions and social conflicts between elites and unemployed masses. In this debate we will look closer at the arguments for this bleak future, ask us what science can tell us about the future, consider different scenarios for the future of work, and maybe even question the importance of work.

The topic is difficult and complex but fortunately we have secured a panel with exceptional competence – the panel is all of you. We will use digital technology to organize a crowd based debate, a “crowdbate”, and use the intelligence of the crowd to throw fresh light on the future of work.

Recently, in his 2012 PhD thesis, Craig Hammond has given interesting insight into a possible relationship of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of the utopian shining forth of future projects on the one hand and the modern theory of deterministic chaos and fractal geometry on the other.[1] Concentrating in particular onto the Blochian concept of the Lived Moment, the emergence of information and meaning is discussed within this context. The idea is to find an onto-epistemic basis for the foundation of human reflexion centred on both rational and irrational discourse strategies within the objective as well as subjective frameworks of given world-views.

[1] Towards a neo-Blochian theory of complexity, hope, and cinematic utopia. Lancaster University.