The presence of intelligent tools, both in the digital and physical realms, is progressively enhancing our capacities to act on personal, organizational, national, and international levels, leading to both intended and unintended consequences. Collectively, these changes are reshaping our world at a speed and scale that necessitate earnest consideration. In the midst of uncertainty, the development and utilization of these new capabilities would greatly benefit from CyberSystemic approache...

Society is now facing challenges for which the traditional management toolbox is increasingly inadequate. Well-grounded theoretical frameworks, such as systems thinking and cybernetics, offer general level interpretation schemes and models that are capable of supporting understanding of complex phenomena and are not impacted by the passage of time.This book serves the knowledge society to address the complexity of decision making and problem solving in the 21st century with contrib...

Important world institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have publicly recognizing the highly interconnected nature of our world and therefore the relevance of systemic thinking and cybernetics as leading knowledge foundations to deal with the complexity of economic, social, and environmental issues. This recognition was the driving force ...

This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series.Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships betw...

How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences.Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering t...

This open access book is about public open spaces, about people, and about the relationship between them and the role of technology in this relationship. It is about different approaches, methods, empirical studies, and concerns about a phenomenon that is increasingly being in the centre of sciences and strategies – the penetration of digital technologies in the urban space. As the main outcome of the CyberParks Project, this book aims at fostering the understanding about the current and f...

How we can enact meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and justice.The deep entanglement of information technology with our societies has raised hope for a transition to more sustainable and just communities—those that phase out fossil fuels, distribute public goods fairly, allow free access to information, and waste less. In principle, computing should be able to help. But in practice, we live in a world in which opaque algorith...

'The following sections are a very good representation of the core developments of complexity thinking in a number of major fields. Our intention is to provide an accessible interdisciplinary introduction to the wonderful intellectual breadth that complexity can offer.' - Jan Bogg and Robert Geyer in the Introduction. Complexity is a new and exciting interdisciplinary approach to science and society that challenges traditional academic divisions, frameworks and paradigms. This book helps t...

This SAGE Handbook brings together cutting edge social scientific research and theoretical insight into the emerging contours of digital society. Chapters explore the relationship between digitisation, social organisation and social transformation at both the macro and micro level, making this a valuable resource for postgraduate students and academics conducting research across the social sciences.The topics covered are impressively far-ranging and timely, including machine learni...

This open access book examines how the social sciences can be integrated into the praxis of engineering and science, presenting unique perspectives on the interplay between engineering and social science. Motivated by the report by the Commission on Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, which emphasizes the importance of social sciences and Humanities in technical fields, the essays and papers collected in this book were presented at the NSF-funde...

The radical transformations to which the economy and society have been subjected for decades have gained momentum in recent years, not least because of the coronavirus pandemic, the consequences of which are yet to be fully understood. As a result, certain economic models and business practices are becoming less sustainable. One of the reasons for this is the rapid advance of Revolution 4.0. The issues raised in this book are central to understanding the theoretical and practical aspects o...

A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big...