At the 3rd International Conference of the International Society for Information Studies (ISIS) (at that time the International Society for the Study of Information (IS4SI) was still known by that name) in Vienna 2015 T. Deacon was elected as President-Elect and G. Dodig-Crnkovic followed W. Hofkirchner as President of the International Society for Information Studies.
Read here her presidential address:
The stage for the Gothenburg summit was set by the theme of Digitalisation for sustainable society, in light of information, computation and cognition. As our previous meetings, the summit 2017 reflected the moment we live in – a nascent movement of digitalization that has started to radically change our society, globally, in literally all its aspects. It is based on the computing technology (in all its forms, digital and analog, that all now go under the name “digital”), which in its turn is based on information and data processing, which all goes back to cognition and intelligence of a cognizing agent in order to acquire meaning. Digitalization has a potential to fundamentally transform the way we live, our whole civilization and our identities. Often mentioned definition from the Business dictionary: Digitalization is integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization of everything that can be digitised – does not tell it all. Digitization as transformation of everything into digital data is only part of the story, telling that libraries will be digitized and turned into formats easy to process by computers. Sensors of various kinds, controlling variety of processes, from traffic control to health care, education, entertainment, production, monetary flows and government will produce increasing amounts of data suitable for further processing and analytics.
During digitalisation data will be increasingly collected, communicated/exchanged and analyzed in cognitive and intelligent computational ways. We talk about cognitive computing and deep learning as two central and hugely promising fields. Data are atoms of information that constitute intricate web of relationships.
Communities of International Society for Information studies are dedicated to the study of information in its many forms and through variety of approaches.
Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic