2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information (IS4SI) "2279

Continuing the tradition of S4SI Summits, the 2021 Summit had the form of ten federated conferences focusing on more specific aspects of the study of information. Its title, “Information Study for the Benefit of Humanity: Learning from the Past and Building the New Normal,” referred to the present great challenge faced by the global community—the pandemic of a new coronavirus that itself can be considered a large scale informational phenomenon. However, the pandemic was not the only global challenge discussed at the conferences contributing to the summit. Another great global challenge discussed at the summit was related to the issues arising with the rapidly increasing role of information technology in all domains of human life and work, and the dangers of their abuse or uncontrolled drift in directions that threaten human wellbeing. These concerns pointed at the need for a better understanding of information as a central concept of science, technology, and culture, another main theme of the summit.


Introduction
The 2021 Summit of the International Society for the Study of Information (IS4SI) was the fourth biannual congregation of the members of the society together with other researchers, philosophers, and practitioners active in all domains of the study of information.
Continuing the tradition established at the earlier S4SI Summits in Vienna (2015), Gothenburg (2017), and Berkeley (2019), the 2021 Summit had the form of ten federated conferences focusing on more specific aspects of the study of information. Its title, "Information Study for the Benefit of Humanity: Learning from the Past and Building the New Normal," referred to the present great challenge faced by the global community-the pandemic of a new coronavirus that itself can be considered a large scale informational phenomenon involving biological, social, political manifestations of information and their dynamics. However, the pandemic was not the only global challenge discussed at the conferences contributing to the summit.
Another great global challenge discussed at the summit was related to the issues arising with the rapidly increasing role of information technology in all domains of human life and work. Although there are unquestionable, great benefits of Artificial Intelligence, digital means of communication, automation, and other technological developments in information processing, storage, and retrieval, there are equally great and formidable dangers of their intentional abuse or uncontrolled drift in directions that threaten human wellbeing. These concerns pointed at the need for a better understanding of information as a central concept of science, technology, and culture. The search for an appropriate methodology for the study of information, providing us with the tools for such understanding, was the complementing theme of the summit. Not all contributions to the summit addressed directly the concept of information. The summit had, as one of its objectives, fostering mutual understanding between diverse fields of study, those in which information already has its central role and those where the presence of information is acknowledged but at present less recognized.
Due to the limited size, the summary of the summit is mainly about the plenary contributions consisting of plenary discussions and 76 plenary lectures, talks, and presentations suggested for all participants of the summit. The plenary sessions were scheduled without alternative tracks to allow for the attendance of all participants. The ten contributing conferences had their more extensive programs of presentations and discussions in parallel sessions with a more specialized focus, leaving the choice of attendance to the preferences of participants. The information about these parallel sessions can be found on the website of the Summit (IS4SI 2021) and/or on the individual websites of the contributing conferences.

President's Theme Statement for the 2021 IS4SI Summit (Marcin J. Schroeder)
The 2021 IS4SI Summit happened in the shadow of the global crisis of the new coronavirus pandemic. Dozens of millions of people have already been infected, some of them suffered but managed to recover but more than a million perished. Millions lost their sources of income, jobs, businesses. The word "crisis" comes from the Greek meaning discernment, judgment, which describes well our present experience. There are now many examples of authentic heroism manifested by people who risk their health or lives bringing medical care to those infected with the virus and there are many examples of the unscrupulous exploitation of human suffering for political or economic gains.
Recently, there is hope that new vaccines will soon bring the spread of the virus under control and that life will return to normal. In this desire to return to normal and to put the dramatic experience behind us there is a hidden danger of forgetting about what we can learn from it. Hegel, in the Introduction to his Philosophy of History, pessimistically claimed "What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." Now, almost two centuries later, this assessment of the short span of memory among politicians and in the general public is equally accurate, but this should not be an excuse for the academic community to forget and not to learn from our experience. Going back to the "old normal" would be a defeat of reason and betrayal of those who suffered and those who sacrificed themselves in the fight with the disease.
It is important not only not to forget and to learn, but what to learn. If the lesson we were given was only about the lack of responsibility of political and economic leaders, their lack of imagination, about the deficiency of their morals, or about the frequently irrational reactions of the general public, then the pain brought by the pandemic would have been in vain. We have multiple examples of those in the past centuries or even millennia. Only someone naïve can expect that next time will be different. Searching for someone to blame for errors cannot replace searching for sources of errors. We can see that a lot of damage and suffering was a result of ignorance fueled by antiscientific and anti-intellectual attitudes, frequent both among political and economic leaders and within broad masses of the human population. It would be counterproductive to be satisfied with this diagnosis, in particular in the latter case. Are we, members of the academic community, without blame? It is our responsibility to promote knowledge and understanding of the world through education. Can we be satisfied with what we offer our societies? Do we have a comprehensive, consistent, scientific, or more generally intellectual view of reality that we could all understand and share among ourselves, and which we can present to the global society?
This does not mean that we have to seek consensus regarding the answers to specific research questions. Progress in science and philosophy has always depended on competing ideas, but productive competition requires common foundations, common rules, and mu-tual understanding. Therefore, we can disagree about answers, but we have to understand each other's questions. We should be able to present this common foundation to the general public, which does not have any reason to trust in our advice when confronted with the lack of agreement and mutual understanding among scientists and intellectuals, in stark contrast to the extreme self-confidence of those who unite in the fight for political and economic power.
There is a desperate need for building a common foundation for science, philosophy, and humanities, for the construction of a comprehensive view of reality integrating the results of diverse methods of inquiry, to restore the position of knowledge and reason as guides for the global society. IS4SI has a special role to play in this task. The concept of information, as probably no other concept in modern thought, is not only present and fundamental in virtually all academic and technological disciplines, but it is familiar (admittedly without a very deep understanding) to the majority of the human population. Its universality qualifies it as the best tool to build an authentic transdisciplinary vision of reality and, at the same time, its familiarity with the general public makes it a good tool for the propagation of this vision.
The 2021 Summit consisted of several component conferences grouping experts in specific forms of inquiry of information, at the same time including plenary activities bringing together all participants. These conferences provided an opportunity to present to fellow researchers the most recent developments within their foci of expertise and the plenary events of the summit had the role of a forum for the exchange of views coming from multiple perspectives for seeking mutual understanding and cooperation.

Organizing Committee of the Summit
The Organizing Committee was chaired by Marcin J. SCHROEDER (IS4SI President; Professor at Global Learning Center of IEHE, Tohoku University at Sendai, Japan) and it consisted of the chairs of the organizing committees of contributing conferences and the members with special responsibilities (e.g., information technology support): Contributing conferences had their own organizing committees, with membership listed on the website of the Summit (IS4SI2021).
The summit did not have a program committee separate from program committees for contributing conferences, which, in some cases, were identical with organizing committees. Chair of the Summit Organizing Committee coordinated the work of program committees for contributing conferences regarding the choice and design of contributions to the plenary program. The schedule of plenary events was designed by the chair of the summit in cooperation with chairs and co-chairs of contributing conferences. This was a complex task for plenary events, which were intended for all participants of the summit as they were in almost all possible time zones of the world. There were last minute changes in the schedule due to unpredictable circumstances (e.g., health emergencies) that required fast decisions. For this reason, the flexible one person decision making on the schedule was preferable.

Contributing Conferences
The titles of contributing conferences (together with abbreviations used in the materials of the summit) were as follows: Some of these conferences belonged to the tradition of the IS4SI Summits, some others were new contributions from organizations with interests related to information.
A more detailed presentation of the topics and programs of contributing conferences and extended abstracts of papers presented at their sessions can be found on the website of the summit (IS4SI 2021) and the websites created by their organizers: Dighum All participants were invited to submit their papers to the Special Issue of Proceedings (MDPI). The choice of the venue for reviewing and publishing materials presented at the summit belongs to the organizing committees of contributing conferences and the present volume of proceedings includes only papers selected in this process. In essence, the review process had two stages-at first, the materials submitted for the presentation at the conference were reviewed and selected for presentation and then presented papers were reviewed and selected for publication.
Several videos with recordings of the presentations from the plenary sessions have been already edited and published on YouTube. Editing and publishing of other recordings is an ongoing project of IS4SI (IS4SI 2021 accessed on 16 March 2022).

Sessions of Plenary Program
The following list shows the titles of presentations at plenary sessions gathering all the participants of the summit and names of authors in the chronological order of their presentations. The titles of presentations at nonplenary, parallel sessions of contributing conferences are reported in the editorials in Proceedings for contributing conferences presenting submitted and accepted papers. The readers will find, in Proceedings, a large collection of papers derived from the work presented at the summit.
Presentations and discussions of the plenary program of the summit, listed below, addressed a very wide range of topics related to information studies from the aspects addressed by natural sciences (in particular biology and physics), computer science (including technological, philosophical and practical matters), logic, and mathematics, to humanities, social sciences, and philosophy. The intention of the program design was to saturate plenary sessions with topics providing a broad view on information and its role in our understanding of reality and, on the other hand, in creating a better future for humanity.