Events Past

A record of Events Past, or past events.

Links to recent Cybernetics Live recordings
Below is the link to our YouTube site
8th October 2025  1700-1900 Decoding Reality – Quantum Information – Prof Vlatko Vedral 

Cite: Vedral, V. (2025, October 8). Cybernetics Live – Decoding Reality – Quantum Information [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/11HHv5tBgVI

We are delighted to welcome a world leading researcher with a deep-rooted passion for a fundamental topic.  Quantum information (QI) is emerging and will influence our understanding of systems and life.

This Cybernetics Live event aims to explore QI and challenge us to consider the impacts.

Established Cybernetics appreciates the importance of variety.  We live in a world where the disruptive effects of digital data are beginning to be understood.   Yet sitting beneath that, we have an even more complex, sophisticated and challenging world to comprehend when our focus on the binary moves to the quantum.

In this Decoding Reality event, our explorations might consider meaning in a QI world or venture into topics like Quantum AI.  We might ask:

  1. How is the Cybernetic concept of variety related to the idea of (multiple) data compressions that decode reality? What does this imply for a philosophy of science?
  2. How do we refine our understanding of concepts of entropy and time once we consider information-theoretic frameworks?
  3. “It from bit” (Wheeler) or “Bit from it” (Vedral) – ultimately, what implications?
  4. Information is a measure of surprise and is also contextual, so an information technology is thereby a means of amplifying some surprise, attenuating other possibilities, and a means of specifying some contexts, obscuring others?
  5. Are we able to understand the implications of QI? How might we educate people and organisations to utilise the full value of quantum-based systems?

We asked CybSoc members views prior to the event please.   The following questions were asked. 12 members responded. Here is the report.

What would you like to know about QI Theory?

  1. What would you like to tell Vlatko about Cybernetics that you think is relevant to QI?
  2. What question would you ask around the social impact of the quantum?
  3. What are the three most important cybernetic principles for QI theory?
  4. What are possible priority areas of research that Quantum Cybernetics might consider?

 

Cybernetics Live: 9 September 2025: Angus Jenkinson – EcoCybernetics: Re-rooting Cybernetics in the Living

APA Style Recommended Citation: Cybernetics Society. (2025, September 10). Cybernetics Live: 9 September 2025: Angus Jenkinson – EcoCybernetics: Re-rooting Cybernetics in the Living [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/O7-Dy_rD7xU

Cybernetics is a good name. So why the ‘rebrand’? The provocation is a set of insights into the origins and nature of cybernetics. It proposes that ecocybernetics focuses on its ontological rather than historic origins, its full scope of explanatory power, and its potential to resolve important issues facing humanity today. Feedback informing this provocation includes (positively) the nature of ecology and (negatively) the historical and biographical conditions of its first formulation by Wiener, McCulloch and co. The science is still immature, but cybernetic activity is the matrix of ecology as a living dynamic milieu. Directive activity and homeostasis existed from the beginnings of life. By contrast, design of assistive military hardware along with the invention of the computer were the prime context in the formation and specification of the discipline, but this was never all it was. To embrace the full power of cybernetics means thinking like the composite metapsychome of a recursive ecosystem. The largest such ecosystem we have is Earth in its cosmic context. The nation’s budget should be ecocybernetic in global synch.

Angus Jenkinson, FCybS, is a former Secretary of the Cybernetics Society, research professor, and advisor focusing on coherent organisations.

Cybernetics Live: 12 August 2025:  Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua – The Fundamentals of Cognition Based User Interface Design.
YouTube Recording

Our speaker is Dr. Rose-Margaret Ekeng-Itua. She is a pioneering STEM Educator, Administrator, and Engineer and an advocate for educational equality for underserved groups; including, women, minorities, and other marginalized groups. She is a strategic leader in higher education pedagogy, policy, and STEM strategy. Rose-Margaret has 15+ years of expertise in teaching, improving student achievement, retention, and progression in STEM Higher Education.  Rose Margaret is a professor in the Bay Area of California. She was attracted to engineering and in particular telecommunications engineering because she fell in love with electromagnetic waveforms during a physics class in high school. She likes to design devices that could manipulate electromagnetic wave forms for the good of humanity. She earned her PhD in Cybernetics from Reading University.

Cybernetics Live: 18th June 2025: Badlands Series #2 – Privacy – Jo Davaris & Geoff Smith
YouTube Recording
Building on the themes examined in our ‘Badlands’ event on 30th April, Jo Ann Lengua Davaris will be exploring the theme of privacy.   Jo Ann Lengua Davaris serves as the Global Chief Privacy Officer at Booking Holdings, a role she has held since 2019, where she has pioneered a unified privacy framework across the company’s iconic brands, including Booking.com, Priceline, Kayak, OpenTable, and Agoda. Her leadership ensures that privacy and data protection are seamlessly woven into global operations while driving innovation, maintaining consumer trust, and enabling the safe expansion of business opportunities. Jo is deeply passionate about shaping policies at the intersection of privacy and AI governance, ensuring that ethical frameworks guide emerging technologies and align with organizational goals.  She received both her JD and her BA from Fordham University.
Jo will be in conversation with Geoff Smith.  For more than 30 years Geoff has led commercially focused data privacy and empowerment functions; developing, operating and transforming data systems and culture across diverse sectors from financial services and tourism to energy suppliers and public health. He is currently involved in building an innovative Green Tech aimed at enabling micro firms to become more carbon efficient and establishing a boutique data consultancy helping organisations manage their ‘quantum risk’.  As a Visiting Professor at Loughborough University he lectures and researches on topics such as digital ethics and trust economies, innovation, leadership and empowerment technology. 
Sat 21st June 1000-1230 Cybernetics Society AGM

This was held online.  

Mon 30th June to Wed 2nd July.  2025 Cybernetics Conversation
The 2025 Cybernetics Conversation was held at Loughborough University Business School from Mon 30th June to Wed 2nd July 2025.  We are delighted that Prof. Andrew Pickering joined us and hosted a keynote session.  
2025 Cybernetics Conversation webpage with details
 Cybernetics Live: 30th April 2025. Badlands Series #1 – Security Cybernetics – Led by Richard Berry and Peter Kawalek
 YouTube Recording
The event is a collaboration between the Cybernetics Society, Loughborough University and the Department of Informatics, Kings College London.
It was an online event broadcast from Bush House in London.
Aims of the event
Far from the optimism of the once-vaunted information age, society seems to have arrived in a situation of multiple, nuanced and overlapping problems:
    – As data has proliferated throughout the world so has the complexity of crime along with hybrid forms of conflict, misinformation and disinformation.
    – There is much ahead: arguably, society is now in the early throes of a triple disruption; Intelligence, Money and Energy. What new threats are emerging?

The regulation of our new systems is of heated political debate – but how is regulation even possible? Bureaucratic and traditional responses do not have requisite variety.

Yet:
    – Cybernetics is the science of effective organization.
    – The societies that adapt best will be the best societies.
Through this ’Badlands’ event and the associated series the Cybernetics Society seeks to map out the territory of the problem and then to theorise over solutions.  Our initial event is a symposium and webcast on technology for malignant purpose which will then turn to introduce potential cybernetic responses that might help.  It will be webcast from Bush House in London.  This is the building where George Orwell worked as a producer for the BBC Eastern Service during World War Two. At this time, the building was used for the BBC Empire Service transmitting programmes across the globe, including coded messages to resistance groups. It remained the home of the BBC World Service until 2012.  
Wed 30th April 2025 1700-1900.  Paul Shiels – The Science of Ageing
Dr Shiels’ career has spanned both industry and academia and has involved 25 years developing a fundamental understanding of biological ageing.

Wed 26th March 2025 1800-2000.  Cybernetics Live: Steve James – Health and Wellbeing

Dr Steve James approach of “A System for Health, not a Health system” integrates across traditional “system” boundaries, including the metabolic model situated in day/night cycles, relationships and behaviours, functions and regulatory processes, and emotions.  The aim is a whole-person wellbeing metabolism.  We are trialing a new timing for this event i.e. 1800-2000 rather than our traditional 1700-1900.  A Zoom registration links will be sent out nearer the time.  Steve’s website is below:

https://drstevejames.com/

Thursday 27th February 2025 with Carola Ritzinger-Roll, Michael Frahm & Matvei Tobman.
Carola, Michael and Matvei will look at management cybernetics as a general framework to successfully implement lean management in several industries (construction, mechanical engineering & healthcare). Numerous lean transformation projects fail or do not achieve the desired performance and/or viability that is necessary for a sustainable implementation of lean management. However, there are some factors that support the successful implementation of lean management in day-to-day business. In the opinion of the authors, these include management cybernetics and, in particular, Stafford Beer’s viable system model (VSM) as a structuring element.  
The paper was published in our journal and the link is below: