Digital Ecologies

Discussion

Mihaela Ulieru:

"With information communication technologies (ICTs) pervading everyday objects and infrastructures, the “Future Internet” is envisioned to leap toward a radical transformation from how we know it today (a mere communication highway) into a vast digital ecology acting as a vital ganglion of the current globalized society and economy and controlling critical infrastructures on a global scale. Intertwining a complex ICT system (as the Internet can well be considered) and a physical complex system (as, for example, the electrical power grid) is leading to what are usually referred to as cyber–physical systems. As a cyber–physical system, a digital ecology is an open ICT control infrastructure in which interconnected interdependent systems of systems weaved by the Internet together with social networks of prosumers (producers and consumers) of applications and services coexist and coevolve, in much the same way as different species share the resources of a common habitat and provide mutual benefits in an ecosystemlike manner.

By including the users themselves as key players in the global collaborative ecosystem, its complexity is approaching (if not already reached) the complexity of naturally evolved systems." (http://www.theimpactinstitute.org/Digital%20Ecologies.pdf)

More Information

• Special Issue on Digital Ecologies. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS—PART A: SYSTEMS AND HUMANS, VOL. 40, NO. 6, NOVEMBER 2010 ; MIHAELA ULIERU, Guest Editor

URL = http://www.theimpactinstitute.org/Digital%20Ecologies.pdf

"The authors featured in this Special Issue push the frontier of interdisciplinary knowledge to be able to engineer and architect large-scale networks of smart cooperative systems by addressing fundamental challenges in the design and operation of new massive-scale complex computing and communications technologies and apply them to enable the seamless and ubiquitous interconnection of diverse environments and smart infrastructures. Present academic knowledge of systems and current practice in the public and private sectors must be radically reconsidered in the light of global interrelated challenges like climate change, sustainability and security or the current fi- nancial crisis that need system-wide global coordinated action, grounded in a new type of science that links data, models, and social decision processes.

Systems thinking is the foundational study that needs to be undertaken in global systems science."