WOSC Congresses

1st WOSC Congress, London, September 1969

The Proceedings are published (3 vols.) in Progress of Cybernetics, ed. J. Rose, Gordon & Breach, London, 1970, Library of Congress catalog card number 73-111944, ISBN 0-677-143109

2nd WOSC Congress, Oxford, 1972

3rd WOSC Congress, Bucharest, 1975

The Proceedings are published in Modern Trends in Cybernetics and Systems, ed. J. Rose & C. Bilciu, Editura Technica, Bucharest and Springer, New York, 1977

4th WOSC Congress, Amsterdam, 1978

The Proceedings are published as Current Topics in Cybernetics and Systems, ed. J. Rose, WOGSC, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1978, ISBN 3-540-08977-2, 0-387-08977-2.

5th WOSC Congress, Mexico City, 1981

6th WOSC Congress, Paris, September 1984

The Proceedings are published (2 vols) in 6ème Congrès International de Cybernétique et de Systémique {6th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems}, published by AFCET, Paris. ISBN 2-903-677-01-8. Also reports by R. Vallée and B.H. Rudall in Kybernetes, vol. 14, pp. 51-53.

7th WOSC Congress, Imperial College, London, Sept. 1987

The Proceedings are published (2 vols.) in Cybernetics and Systems: The Way Ahead, ed. J. Rose, Thales Publications, Lytham St Annes, England, 1987. ISBN 0-9506151-1-0 for set of 2 volumes; 0-9506151-2-9 for vol. 1; 0-9506151-3-7 for vol. 2. Also report by R. Vallée in Kybernetes, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 55-56.

8th WOSC Congress, New York City, 1990

The Proceedings are published as “Proceedings of the 8th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems”, ed. C.N. Manikopoulis, The New Jersey Institute of Technology Press, Newark, 1990. They give a selection of communications and others may be found in “The Cybernetics of Complex Systems”, ed. F. Geyer, Intersystems Publications. There is a report by B.H. Rudall in Kybernetes, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 61-63.

9th WOSC Congress, New Delhi, January 1993

The Proceedings are published as: Recent Advances in Cybernetics and Systems, ed. A Ghosal and P.N. Murthy, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, New Delhi, 1993, ISBN 0-07-46119-X.

A report on the meeting appears in the News, Conferences and Technical Reports section of Kybernetes. It includes contributions from B.H. Rudall and R. Vallée. It is in Kybernetes vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 60-66, 1993.

The Presidential Address to the Congress is published as: World in Torment: A Time Whose Idea Must Come, by Stafford Beer, Kybernetes vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 15-43, 1993.

10th WOSC Congress, Bucharest, August 1996

A Special Issue of Kybernetes, comprising nos. 6 and 7 of vol. 26, 1997, contains 16 papers from the Sociocybernetics section organised by Dr Felix Geyer of the Netherlands Universities’ Centre for Co-ordination of Research in Social Sciences. It also has, as the Editorial Preface (Prof. B.H. Rudall) on pp. 632-633, a brief report on the Congress as a whole. An earlier report by B.H. Rudall appeared in Kybernetes vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 84-90, and on the General Assembly of the Directorate on the same occasion, on pp. 90-91.

11th WOSC Congress, London, August 1999

The Eleventh Congress was held in Brunel University, Uxbridge (West London), Middlesex, United Kingdom, during 23-27 August 1999. A selection of papers from it appear in issues of Kybernetes vol. 29(2000). Details of the Proceedings published in book form, and additional notes on certain papers, can be found at: Eleventh Congress, 1999

12th WOSC Congress, Pittsburgh, March 2002

The Twelfth International WOSC Congress was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during March 24-26, 2002, as a joint event with the Fourth Workshop of The International Institute for General Systems Studies. Details can be found here of the IIGSS.

Reports on the meeting can be found in Kybernetes, vol. 31, no. 7/8, 2002, pp. 1156-1168, and selected papers have appeared in vol. 31, no. 9/10, 2002 and vol. 32, no. 5/6, 2003. A short report has appeared in Industrial Robot, Volume 29, Number 4, 2002, pp.322-323, and a very short one in Robotica, vol. 20, part 5, 2002, p. 573.

In addition to the above-mentioned selected papers, special issues of Kybernetes have been devoted to topics that received particular attention in the Congress, including vol. 32, no. 7/8, 2003, on “Some new theories about space and time”, vol. 33, no. 2, 2004, on “Grey systems theory and applications” and vol. 33, no. 5/6, 2004, on “Reconstructability analysis”.

13th WOSC Congress, Maribor, Slovenija, July 2005

The Thirteenth International WOSC Congress was held in Maribor, Slovenia, during July 6-10, 2005. The local organiser was Professor Matjaž Mulej of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Maribor (joint author of the paper: “How to restore Bertalanffian systems thinking”, Kybernetes, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 48-61, 2004)

The 6th International Conference of Sociocybernetics, organised by the Research Committee on Sociocybernetics (RC51) of the International Sociological Association was an independent part of the WOSC Congress. Details of the combined event can be found at http://epfip.uni-mb.si/wosc&isa.htm.

A report on the Congress by Prof. Robert Vallée appears in Kybernetes vol. 35, 2006, no. 1/2, pp. 230-233. It includes the text of his address to the meeting, as well as one delivered on behalf of Prof. John Rose, Honorary Director and founder of WOSC, who was unable to be present. It also includes a brief message from Dr. Alex Andrew, Director-General, who was also unable to be present, and an address by Prof. Brian Rudall, Vice-President of WOSC and Director of the Norbert Wiener Institute, and Editor-in Chief of Kybernetes.

Selected papers from the Congress will appear in Kybernetes.

14th WOSC Congress, Wrocław, Poland, September 2008

The 14th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics was held in Wroclaw, Poland on September 9–12, 2008. The event was hosted by the Institute of Information Science and Engineering at the Wroclaw University of Technology.

Full reports of the Congress were published in Kyberentes Vol. 38 Nos 1/2, 2009, pp. 257-70.

Kybernetes Research Award (outstanding paper):

• Dorota Bors and Marek Majewski. “On the controllability to the interval of the system governed by a hyperbolic equation”.

Kybernetes Research Awards (highly commended paper):

• Pasqual Francesc Esteve-Calvo and Miguel Lloret-Climent. “Turbulences as an example of disorder in systems-linkage”.
• Gonçalo Furtado. “Gordon Past Exchanges between cybernetics and architecture and the envisioning of the informational environment”.
• Gary Boyd and Wojciech Jaworski. “Effective learning and efficient production through modelling, simulation and three types of conversation”.

Organising committee awards (best presentations by young scientists):

• Jernej Belak for the presentation of the paper “Life cycle stage and enterprise ethical climate case of Slovenian enterprises” by Jernej Belak, Matjaz Mulej.
• Gintautas Narvydas for the presentation of the paper “Expert guided autonomous, mobile robot learning” by Gintautas Narvydas, Vidas Raudonis, Rimvydas Simutis.
• Anna Pakshina for the presentation of the paper “The research of the young genius’s phenomenon”.
• Julia Pakshina for the presentation of the paper “The scientific predictions of Vladimir Odoevsky and web-technologies”.

Three post-congress publications have been released which contain extended and updated versions of the papers presented during the Congress:

• Knowledge-Based Intelligent System Advancements: Systemic and Cybernetic Approaches, J. Józefczyk, D. Orski, Eds., Information Science Reference (IGI Global), Hershey, New York 2011 (with Foreword by R. Vallée)
• Kybernetes, Vol. 38 issue 7/8, 2009
• Systems Science, vol. 35, No. 1, 2009

15th WOSC Congress, Nanjing, China, September 2011

The successful congress was held in Nanjing, People’s Republic of China, during September 15-18, 2011, jointly with the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligent Services, with local arrangements admirably seen to by Professor Sifeng Liu and his team. The interesting location was the campus of the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, on the site of a former Ming Palace when Nanjing was the capital of China. A report on the meeting, and in due course selected papers, will appear in Kybernetes.

At the close of the Congress, an award was made to Professor Julong Deng, the originator of Grey Systems Theory, of Honorary Fellowship of WOSC. He belongs to the Department of Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.

Also awarded were the Kybernetes prize for the Outstanding Paper of the Congress, and three for Highly Commended papers. The Outstanding Paper award was for the paper:

• “Elements of the Parametrical Regulation Theory of the National Economy Evolution Based on Computable General Equilibrium Models” by Abdykappar A. Ashimov, Bahyt T. Sultanov, Zheksenbek M. Adilov, Yuriy V. Borovskiy, Nikolay Yu. Borovskiy, and Askar A. Ashimov, of the Department of Parametrical Regulation of the Kazakh National Technical University, Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The three Highly Commended papers were as follows:

• “Novel DGM model of systematic main variable trend forecasting based on interval grey number sequence” by Naiming Xie, of the College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics , 29 Yudao St., Nanjing.
• “P-Moment Stability of Impulsive Stochastic Differential Systems and Its Application in Grey Stochastic Delay Systems” by Chunhua Su,Dang Luo, of the College of Mathematics and Information Science, Xinyang Normal University, Xinyang, 464000, P.R. China.
• “Worst-case Absolute Regret based Solution Algorithms for Optimization Problems with Interval Uncertainty” by Jerzy Jozefczyk and Marcin Siepak, of the Institute of Informatics, Wrocław University of Technology, Wrocław, Poland.

Selected papers from this Congress have been published in Kybernetes: Vol 41 No 3/4 with contributions by Jose Perez Rios et al, Alfonso Reyes, German Bula, Raul Espejo and Markus Schwaninger , and also in Vol 41 No 5/6 and Vol 41 No 7/8, both edited by Prof. Sifeng Liu,  local organiser of the Congress.

16th WOSC Congress, Ibague October 2014

The Congress “Our Self-organising World: from Disruption to Reparation” took place in Colombia from the 15th to the 17th of October 2014.

WOSC distinguished Professor Dr Humberto Maturana with the Norbert Wiener Memorial Gold Medal

Prize and Commendations to papers

17th WOSC Congress, Rome, January 2017

The Congress took place in Rome, 25-27. January 2017. It was co-organised by the University of Rome – La Sapienza and Association for research on Viable Systems (ASVSA).

The proceedings of the Congress were published in the book: Cybernetics and Systems: Social and Business Decisions edited by Sergio Barile, Raul Espejo, Igor Perko, Marialuisa Saviano.

WOSC 2017 related papers were submitted to the following journals.

• Kybernetes with the special issue Cyber-systemic thinking for a smart society
• Futures. The journal of policy, planning and futures studies with the special issue Futures of Society: The Interactions Revolution
• Sustainability Science with the special issue  People, Technology and Governance for Sustainability: the contribution of Systems and Cyber-systemic thinking
• Journal of Knowledge Management
• Journal of Management and Governance

18th WOSC Congress, Moscow, September 2021

The Congress took place in Online, 27-30. September 2021. It was co-organised by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

WOSC 2021 related papers were submitted to the following journals.

• WOSC 2021 Congress book  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.,  and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Kybernetes  47 (2) On social responsibility, reflexivity and development of cybernetics edited by Igor Perko and Vladimir LepskiyI
• Systems research and behavioural science 
• Sustainability This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.        
• This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Systemist    This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.l
• Economic Strategies   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Philosophy questions This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.