iMultidisciplinarity and its Implications:View from Ljubljana

dr. Žiga Turk

professor, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

EINS project kick-off meeting,Brussels, 21.12.2011

Contents

• Past in Ljubljana– briefly about the

research team• Future of Europe– Reflection Group on the

Future of Europe• Future of GEANT– GEANT Expert Group

• Future of the WorldEU ISS: The world in 2030

Past in Ljubljana

• Chair of Construction Informatics– how IT has been

changing the creation, maintenance and use of the built environment

• role of technology, philosophy of information modeling, core construction topics

iInterdisciplinary:Built Environment and Society • Richard Florida:

– “Human Talent is the Ultimate Economic Resource”

• The War on Talent:– Quantity, Quality, Impowerment

• Immigration• Construction provides

– housing,– work environment,– civil infrastrcture

• Provides an attractive place for talent

Reflection Group on the Future of Europe

The Group is chaired by Mr. Felipe Gonzalez Marquez, assisted by two Vice-Chairs, Ms. Vaira Vike-Freiberga and Mr. Jorma Ollila, and includes 9 more members, all eminent experts in their own fields: Ms. Lykke Friis, Mr. Rem Koolhaas, Mr. Richard Lambert, Mr. Mario Monti, Mr. Rainer Munz, Ms. Kalypso Nicolaidis, Ms. Nicole Notat, Mr. Wolfgang Schuster and Mr. Lech Walesa. The Group is supported by a secretariat headed by Secretary-General, Mr. Žiga Turk.

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ABCDE of grand transformations

• automation and abundance• BRICs and globalization• climate change and energy• demography• e-everything

BCDE

AEurope has choices across ABCDE

• restructure for post industrial society

• agent of change, trend setter, player

• maintain technological and political lead

• family and immigration friendly

• embrace digital like we embraced print

• cherish industrial traditions

• bunch of passive selfish former superpowers

• build walls for migrants and dams for seas

• a continent of grumpy old men (an women)

• defend the ways of paper based society

Chapter: Growth Through Knowledge: Empowering the Individual• “Knowledge-based and creative industries and

services have expanded significantly over the last two decades, becoming the central pillars for employment and economic dynamism in Europe”

• “European Research Area must become a reality – an area without borders where all scientific potential, wherever it is, can be fully tapped thanks to the free movement of researchers, ideas, technologies and capital”

Interdisciplinary:

• Impact of Internet on Europe

• e.g. European Research Area i

GEANT Expert Group

• task:– “articulate a 2020 vision for European Research and Education

networking and will identify an action plan for realizing this vision”

• members:– Žiga Turk (chair), Arndt Bode, Vasilis Maglaris, Dorte Olesen,

Roberto Saracco, Peter Tindemans, Pedro Veiga• timeframe:

– december 2010-august 2011

The Vision of GEG

• “GÉANT 2020” is the European communications commons

• where talent anywhere is able to collaborate with their peers around the world and

• to have instantaneous and unlimited access to any resource for knowledge creation, innovation and learning,

• unconstrained by the barriers of the pre-digital world.

Goals that Fulfill the Vision

1. Support knowledge communities by providing world-class connectivity and services.

2. Support the growth of these communities, in both breadth and depth within Europe, and opening up to talent beyond Europe’s borders ;

3. Push the state-of-the-art of the communications commons by constant innovation and by translating this innovation into a competitive European ICT sector;

4. Reorganize to cope with the constantly changing environment.

Interdisciplinarity:

• Impact of Internet on Scientific Communities

• also past research:– open access publishing i

ESPAS Project

• Global Tredns 2030

• interconnected world

Society is organized according to its communication means

Can information technology bring about a change from a totalitarian to a democratic system?

How change happens

innovation

habitualization(gets widely

adopted)

objectification (orgs. start to

adapt)

sedimentation (becomes part of the norms)

(Scotts Institutional Theory, cascade by Tolbert and Zucker)

technological populism

Interdisciplinary: Throughout History ICTs were empowering

• exclusive technologies were empowering the centre

• democratic technologies empowered masses– paper in the renaissance– paper based democracy

• internet? i

Interdisciplinary: Summary

• Internet and the Built Environment

• Internet and Broadest European Political Strategies

• Internet and the Empowering Talent

• Internet and Democracy i

Eins, zwei, drei:

• “The essence of technology is nothing technical”