Cognitonics 2011 - The Second International Conference on Cognitonics - a subconference of the Multiconference "Information Society 2011"

The Second International Conference on Cognitonics - a subconference of the Multiconference "Information Society 2011" (October 10-11, 2011, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

Co-Chairs: Dr. Vladimir A. Fomichov (*) and Dr. Olga S. Fomichova (**)

(*) Faculty of Business Informatics, State University - Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia; http://www.hse.ru/lingua/en/org/persons/67739 <https://webmail.snhu.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=4f84d3e8...> ;
(**) State Educational Centre "Dialogue of Sciences", Moscow, Russia

#Workshop Theme

During the last decade many scholars at various international and national conferences, in the books and papers have said and written about serious distortions in the development of the personality and national cultures caused by stormy development of informational technologies and globalization processes.

The conviction that it is not only necessary but also POSSIBLE to make something constructive and significant for compensating these distortions has underlied the elaboration of the foundations of a new scientific discipline called Cognitonics (see free of charge the fundamental paper on Cognitonics in Informatica. An International Journal of Computing and Informatics (Slovenia), 2006, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 387-398, www.informatica.si/vol30.htm#No4 <http://www.informatica.si/vol30.htm#No4> and the Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cognitonics (Slovenia, Ljubljana, 12-13 October 2009) - a subconference of the 12th International Multiconference Information Society, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia; http://is.ijs.si/is/is2009/zborniki.asp?lang=eng; Proceedings A, Section "Cognitonics").

Cognitonics aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information society and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields by means of elaborating systemic solutions for compensating the negative implications of the kind for the personality and society, in particular, for creating cognitive-cultural preconditions of the harmonic development of the personality in the information society and for ensuring the successful development of national cultures and national languages.

The birth of Cognitonics was stimulated by the ideas of Philosophy, Cognitive Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence theory, Web Science, Applied Linguistics, Art theory, Cognitive Psychology, and Cognitive Biology.

Two factors seem to be especially important from the standpoint of achieving the goals of Cognitonics:

- informational technologies have been developing extremely quickly and have been expanding unusually broadly, they penetrate not only into every office and laboratory but also into every school class and every family;

- it is necessary and promising to use the power of modern informational technologies in order to very quickly and broadly disseminate the found effective methods of compensating the negative distortions in the development of the personality and of national cultures in information society.

The goal of the conference is to combine the efforts of the scholars from numerous scientific fields and educators in order to establish a new synergy aimed at ensuring the harmonic, well-balanced development of the personality and national cultures in the modern information society and, as a consequence, to compensate a number of broadly observed negative distortions.

From the standpoint of educational practice, Cognitonics proposes an answer to the following question: what precious ideas and images accumulated by the mankind,
at what age, and in what a way are to be inscribed into the conceptual picture of the world of a person in order to harmonize his/her intellectual and spiritually-coloured
emotional development and to contribute to the successful development of national cultures.

Cognitonics formulates a new, large-scale goal for the software industry and Web science: to develop a new generation of culture-oriented computer programs and
online courses (in the collaboration with educators, linguists, art historians, psychologists) - the computer programs and online courses intended for supporting and developing positively-oriented creativity, cognitive-emotional sphere, the appreciation of the roots of the national cultures, the awareness of the integrity of the cultural space in the information society, and for supporting and developing symbolic information processing and linguistic skills, associative and reasoning abilities of children and university students.

#PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Rosa Maria Bottino (Italy)

Dan Dumitru Burdescu (Romania)

Bridget Cooper (England)

Vladimir Fomichov (Russia)

Olga Fomichova (Russia)

Toshio Okamoto (Japan)

Luciano Seta (Italy)

Gaba Tsayang (Botswana)

Linda Turner (Australia)

Hirohiko Yasuda (Japan).

#The conference will have four tracks (not parallel):
Track 1: The Methods and Tools of Computer Science and Web Science.

Track 2: Development of Skills for Being Successful in Information Society.

Track 3: Early Socialization of the Child in Information Society: the Need of and Innovative Approaches.

Track 4: Social Consequences of Globalization and Technological Progress.

The expected topics of these tracks are listed below. The working language of the conference is English.

#Registration
The participants of the conference register for the Multi-Conference "Information Society-2011 (IS-2011)" (Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia).
The registration fee (see in the second half of December 2010 the IS-2011 Web-site) covers the participation in all sessions of IS-2011, a hard copy of the IS-2011 Proceedings, coffee-breaks, and a Cocktail Party on October 11th). The registration fee of IS-2011 will be close to the registration fee of IS-2011 (http://is.ijs.si/prijava_eng.asp?lang=eng).

#Important Dates
Preliminary Registration Form: April 15, 2011

(the receipt of preliminary registration forms many weeks before the deadline, in particular, in December 2010 and January 2011 will be highly appreciated)

Paper: April 15, 2011

Authors Notification: May 15, 2011
Final Paper (for the Proceedings of Information Society 2011, 4 pages long): May 31, 2011.

#Expected Topics (their list is not exhaustive)

Track 1: The Methods and Tools of Computer Science and Web Science

The methods of designing and experience of using culture-oriented computer intelligent systems (local computer network based or Web-based) and online courses for:
- developing linguistic mechanisms and communication skills of young children, teenagers, university students, and adult learners,
- expanding mental outlook and enriching language through learning literature, poetry, art, history, architecture, ecology, etc.;

- supporting and developing any qualities and skills mentioned in the formulation of almost every topic pertaining to Tracks 2 - 4.

Track 2: Development of Skills for Being Successful in Information Society:

- realizing the complete potential of teaching/learning literature, poetry, art, history, foreign languages for developing the skill of integrating information (a) from dispersed sources; (b) from remote fragments of the same long discourse;

- cognitive preconditions of introducing children to computers, in particular, the methods of realizing the Thought Producing Self of the child (see The British Journal of Educational Technology, 2000, Vol. 31, No. 3 (July), pp. 213-220) before his/her systematic acquaintance with computer as a precondition of preserving the creativity of the child;

- innovative ways of supporting and developing the positively-oriented creativity of the young child, teenager, and university student;

- innovative approaches to supporting and developing the figurative (metaphoric) reasoning of young children, teenagers, and university students as a foundation of successful carrier in technical and art design, marketing, mathematics, physics, etc.;

- innovative ways of teaching foreign language as a mirror reflecting the peculiarities of the psychology of the people belonging to a particular culture as a basis of successful direct and Internet communication;

- increasing the effectiveness of educational processes with the help of formal means for visual representation of concepts' connections and dynamic conceptual mappings (in particular, concept maps and conceptual-visual dynamic schemes).

Track 3: Early Socialization of the Child in Information Society: the Need of and Innovative Approaches:

- how to make children distinguish virtual life from real life, virtual imaginary situation from the real one;

- how to make children and teenagers be aware of the real consequences following their virtual actions;

- how to make computer-mediated and cell-telephone-mediated interaction of children and teenagers less harmful;

- how to considerably diminish the total aggressiveness of teenagers using modern information communication technologies;

- how to improve positively-oriented (positively-coloured) creativity with the help of modern information technologies;

- how to prevent using primitive language by teenagers and improve their language (because language is our primary tool of thinking, and primitive language entails primitive thinking).

Track 4: Social Consequences of Globalization and Technological Progress

- looking for the philosophical roots of modern technological achievements and forecasting their impact on the nature of the human being,

- analyzing the negative shifts in the modern society and the response of the young generation to these shifts,

- what to do with digital divide,

- how to preserve national culture and enrich it in the information society,

- how to preserve national language and national identity,

- how to diminish the shift from the eternal moral values to commercialized values caused by the rapid changes in the information society,

- looking for the new ways of introducing the eternal values of the humanity and the changes in the perception of the world in the educational programs in the form of cross-disciplinary courses.

#Format and Way of Submitting Preliminary Registration Forms

A plain text message or a Word file with the extension .DOC (not .DOCX) or Word RTF file with the extension .RTF via e-mail at EACH of the following addresses:
vfomichov AT hse.ru vfomichov-AT-hse.ru ; v.fomichov-AT-snhu.edu ; vfomichov-AT-gmail.com.

#PRELIMINARY REGISTRATION FORM

Last name, First Name, Title (in particular, Ms., Mrs. or Mr.):
Position, Institution:
Postal Address:
E-mail:
Fax number (optional):
Phone Number (optional):
Do you plan to submit a paper?: Yes/No
Preliminary title or subject of the paper (if applicable)

Short abstract - several phrases (optional):
Do you plan to attend the Conference? Yes/No
I need the following technical equipment: