Trust in the Information Society

A conference organized by the European Commission & INTECO

February 10^th & 11^th 2010 in León, Spain

Report by: José María Díaz Nafría

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The conference Trust in the Information Society, held on the 10^th and 11^th of Februrary, 2010 in Leon, Spain, aimed at gathering the complete spectrum of stakeholders in the Information Society to address the issue of steering ICTs to be trustworthy. The conference agenda was built around five major topics that emerged out of a survey of the “Advisory Board of Research and Innovation for Security, Privacy and Trustworthiness in the Information Society” (RISEPTIS) supported by the European Commission since 2008 and aimed at providing “visionary guidance on policy and research challenges in the field of security and trust.” The five topics -constituting different sessions- were: 1) Digital life and trust (an industrial view); 2) Trustworthy networking and computing services; 3) An European Framework for digital identity management; 4) Development of the Legal Framework of the EU with regard to the protection of Data and Privacy, 5) International cooperation on trust and security research.

The relevance of this conference is twofold: on the one hand, it provides guidance for European research policies and industrial innovation in the information technology realm; on the other hand, it offers patterns for an Information Society which is envisaged as an European backbone (for instance, in the Lisbon Treaty), therefore as a cultural and political concern.

 

Forth International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science, Beijin, 20-23 August 2010

From BITagora and the SoII directory board, we are very pleased to announce this conference, wishing it became a turning point in the erection of a new science of information. We wish to express our gratitude to all organisers and especially to Hua-Can He and to our colleagues Pedro, Wolfgang and Zong-Rong.

FlS 2010: Towards a New Science of Information

Beijing: 20-23 August, 2010

Conference website: www.fis2010.cn (http://fis2010.sisi2006.cn/fis2010/index.aspx)

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Continuing the series of FIS Conferences (Madrid 1994, Vienna 1996, Paris 2005) a new venue will be held in Beijing 2010.  In our times, an increasing number of disciplines are dealing with information in very different ways: from information society and information technology to communication studies (and related subjects like codes, meaning, knowledge, and intelligence), as well as quantum information, bioinformation, knowledge economy, network science, computer science and Internet, to name but a few. At the same time, an increasing number of scientists in the East and the West have been engaged with the foundational problems underlying this development, to such an extent that the integration of disciplines revolving around information seems an idea whose time has come. A new science of information can be envisaged that explores the possibilities of establishing a common ground around the information concept, of constructing a new scientific perspective that connects the different information-related disciplines and provides a new framework for transdisciplinary research.

The purpose of this conference is thus:

• to enable the discussion of different concepts, theories and approaches to the information field,
• to facilitate the exchange between informational disciplines concerning different but complementary tasks, objects of study, and methodologies,
• to network researchers and research institutions as well as knowledge transfer institutions in the promotion of the new science of information,
• to create a new community of scholars and to promote a new style of scholarship,
• to advance a new point of view on global problems.