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Methodologies
Published in Gideon Samid, Computer-Organized Cost Engineering, 2020
Feedback is not less universal than hierarchy. Control engineering, cybernetics, the human body, the economy — all subscribe to feedback processes. In our context, feedback reflects the need to establish a systematic comparison between what a solution plan hopes to achieve and what it actually achieves. Typical to the pursuit of computer solutions is the excuse of flux and dynamics: the field advances so fast that it is relatively easy to justify a gap between expectations and reality. This is how, in many shops, there is an ongoing effort to improve productivity by spending more and more time on chasing the panacea that will do just that. It may be too embarrassing to clock the productivity-chase effort. In other cases, the justification for computerization is the reduction of the paper load. Sanctioned by this important goal, the team fills up shelves with computer-related documentation.
Introduction
Published in Philip J. Smith, Robert R. Hoffman, Cognitive Systems Engineering, 2018
Philip J. Smith, Robert R. Hoffman
A second goal has been to provide a glimpse into the history and evolution of the field as it was driven by a push to design increasingly complex human–machine systems that were enabled by advances in a variety of technologies. This practical need, along with the Zeitgeist of the early 1980s, brought together an interdisciplinary mix of researchers from the psychological sciences such as cognitive psychology (and kindred fields like anthropology and social psychology) with fields focused on the invention of new technological capabilities (such as artificial intelligence) and fields focused on systems engineering, cybernetics, and control theory.
Propping up interdisciplinarity: responsibility in university flagship research
Published in Journal of Responsible Innovation, 2021
Mads Dahl Gjefsen, Knut Jørgen Vie
NTNU Cyborg first arose as an idea within the university administration and gained traction during open meetings where researchers explored possibilities for collaboration. Popular appeal and visibility were stressed from the outset, as a senior figure in the university administration explained: I requested a robot that would travel on campus […] it could become a show-off for NTNU. […] it points towards a world which is very different from the one we have today. So, there was […] the outreach-component (Initiator and research director at an overarching research program).A faculty member and early coordinator stressed communicability as central to NTNU Cyborg’s two-fold aims, which consisted on the one hand of creating something physical and interactive which could promote the research, and on the other, of disciplinary research questions and the intersection of disciplines (Associate Professor in computer science and former project coordinator). The initiative’s website states that the ‘social and interactive Cyborg serves as a platform for studying neural signalling properties, robotics and hybrid bio-robotic machines.’ The main departments involved are Engineering Cybernetics, Computer Science, Neuromedicine and Movement Science, and Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, from whom about a dozen senior faculty members and PhD candidates are active contributors. Another two dozen senior faculty members from other departments are involved as collaborators.
Recent Developments in Cybernetics, from Cognition to Social Systems
Published in Cybernetics and Systems, 2019
Stuart A. Umpleby, Tatiana A. Medvedeva, Vladimir Lepskiy
As more social scientists were attracted to the field of cybernetics, more thought was given to social systems. One way to describe the development of cybernetics is to say that it has progressed through three stages – engineering cybernetics, biological cybernetics and social cybernetics. See Table 2 (Umpleby 2014). These three approaches to cybernetics can be arranged in a triangle using Karl Popper’s three worlds (Popper 1978). In Figure 3 the left side of the triangle would be the positivist approach to science. Scientists create descriptions of the world. The observer is explicitly excluded due to a desire to be objective. Biological cybernetics is concerned with how the brain creates descriptions of the world. Little attention is paid to the world since it already is included in the perceptions of the observer. Social cybernetics is concerned with how people act in the world. Theories or descriptions are thought to be less important than appropriate actions. Hence, each side of the triangle emphasizes two vertices and deemphasizes the third. Second-order cybernetics was first a theory of knowledge (bottom of the triangle) and later also a description of how knowledge is used (right side of the triangle). With this triangle second-order cybernetics became not a competing epistemology to positivism but a theory of epistemologies (Umpleby 2016).