Jeff Kramer

Julian Nida-Rümelin

Allison Stanger

Hannes Werthner

Carlo Ghezzi

Erich Prem

Bashar Nuseibeh

This open access textbook introduces and defines digital humanism from a diverse range of disciplines. Following the 2019 Vienna Manifesto, the book calls for a digital humanism that describes, analyzes, and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind, for a better society and life, fully respecting universal human rights. The book is organized in three parts: Part I “Background” provides the multidisciplinary background needed to understand digital humanism in its philosophical, cultural, technological, historical, social, and economic dimensions. The goal is to present the necessary knowledge upon which an effective interdisciplinary discourse on digital humanism can be founded. Part II “Digital Humanism – a System’s View” focuses on an in-depth presentation and discussion of the main digital humanism concerns arising in current digital systems. The goal of this part is to make readers aware and sensitive to these issues, including e.g. the control and autonomy of AI systems, privacy and security, and the role of governance. Part III “Critical and Societal Issues of Digital Systems” delves into critical societal issues raised by advances of digital technologies. While the public debate in the past has often focused on them separately, especially when they became visible through sensational events the aim here is to shed light on the entire landscape and show their interconnected relationships. This includes issues such as AI and ethics, fairness and bias, privacy and surveillance, platform power and democracy. This textbook is intended for students, teachers, and policy makers interested in digital humanism. It is designed for stand-alone and for complementary courses in computer science, or curricula in science, engineering, humanities and social sciences. Each chapter includes questions for students and an annotated reading list to dive deeper into the associated chapter material. The book aims to provide readers with as wide an exposure as possible to digital advances and their consequences for humanity. It includes constructive ideas and approaches that seek to ensure that our collective digital future is determined through human agency.

A Textbook

Introduction to Digital Humanism

Beat Schmid

Walter Schertler

A. Min Tjoa

The proceedings of the conference ENTER - International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies in Tourism provide an international forum for the discussion of the role of telecommunication and information systems in tourism, inform potential users and people concerned with the importance of such technologies and to explain their functioning, and finally intensify the contact and the communication between researchers, system developers and users. Tourism and leisure industry experiences a fast technological development, however, the different participants in this market are very differently prepared to meet this challange. The general theme of ENTER in 1995 is electronic marketing. This is the background to the discussion presented in this volume, dealing with questions like how an equal and fruitful cooperation for all participants can take place, when one should participate in this development and enter the electronic market, what are the dangers of entering too early or too late, whether the environment is prepared for such a development, and what can be learned from other sectors. The results of this discussion are of interest for scientists, researchers and practitioners in tourism as well as in the computer industry.

Proceedings of the International Conference in Innsbruck, Austria, 1995

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism

Martin Bichler

Although only a few years old, electronic commerce offers new ways of doing business that no business can afford to ignore. This book is a collection of selected contributions from renowned researchers who specialize in the various facets of electronic commerce, namely economics, finance, information technology, and education. The basic goal is to give an overview of some of the most relevant topics in E-Commerce.

Lectures in E-Commerce

Frank van Harmelen

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This volume discusses the prospects and evolution of informatics (or computer science), which has become the operating system of our world, and is today seen as the science of the information society. Its artifacts change the world and its methods have an impact on how we think about and perceive the world. Classical computer science is built on the notion of an “abstract” machine, which can be instantiated by software to any concrete problem-solving machine, changing its behavior in response to external and internal states, allowing for self-reflective and “intelligent” behavior. However, current phenomena such as the Web, cyber physical systems or the Internet of Things show us that we might already have gone beyond this idea, exemplifying a metamorphosis from a stand-alone calculator to the global operating system of our society. Thus computer scientists will need to reconsider the foundations of their discipline to realize the full potential of our field. Taking often contradictory developments into consideration, researchers will not be able to tackle specific technological or methodological problems in the future without also a broader reflection on their field. The papers in this book take a first step forward and reflect on these issues from different perspectives. The broad spectrum of topics includes Informatics: a discipline with a (short) history and a high impact Interdisciplinarity: how to do research Ethics: what is our responsibility Diversity: why are there so few women in informatics Combining informatics, history and art: a special contribution. This book is intended for all informatics researchers, in academia as well as in industry. It is our responsibility – not only as scientists but also as citizens – to make the public aware of the dichotomies and dialectic relationships of computer science.

Proceedings of the 11th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2015), Vienna, October 2015

Informatics in the Future

Edward A. Lee

This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs.

Perspectives on Digital Humanism

The book provides a survey about the field of Qualitative Reasoning, it contrasts and classifies its approaches and puts them into a common framework. Qualitative Reasoning represents an approach of Artificial Intelligence to model dynamic systems, about which little information is available, and to derive statements about the potential behavior of these systems, putting emphasis on a causal explanation of the behavior. Both variables and relationships between variables are described by means of qualitative terms such as small and large or positive and negative. Since this approach also takes into consideration the way how humans reason about physical systems, it can be stated that Qualitative Reasoning participates in the creation of a cognitive theory of non-numerical process descriptions which can be mapped onto a digital computer. This approach can be used for simulation, diagnosis, design, structure identification and interpretation. Areas of application are physics, medicine, the field of ecology, process control, etc. In addition to the classification of existing methods, the book presents a new approach based on fuzzy sets. And the work relates Qualitative Reasoning with such fields of Expert Systems, System Theory and Cognitive Science.

Modeling and the Generation of Behavior

Qualitative Reasoning

Birgit Pröll

Kurt Bauknecht

We welcome you to the 6th International Conference on E-Commerce and Web Technology (EC-Web 2005) held in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was held in conjunction with DEXA 2005. This conference was organized for the first time in Greenwich, UK, in 2000, and it has been able to attract an increasing number of participants and interest, reflecting the progress made in the field. As in the five previous years, EC-Web 2005 served as a forum that brought together researchers from academia and practitioners from industry to discuss the current state of the art in e-commerce and Web technologies. We are sure that inspirations and new ideas emerged from the intensive discussions that took place during the formal sessions and social events. Keynote addresses, research presentations and discussions during the conference helped to further develop the exchange of ideas among current researchers, developers and practitioners. The conference attracted 139 paper submissions and each paper was reviewed by three Program Committee members. The Program Committee selected 39 papers for presentation and publication (an acceptance rate of 28%). And we have to confess that this task was not that easy due to the high quality of the submitted papers.

6th International Conference, EC-Web 2005, Copenhagen, Denmark, August 23-26, 2005, Proceedings

E-Commerce and Web Technologies

A Min Tjoa

Stefan Klein

For the third time now, experts in tourism from all over the world come to Innsbruck in order to exchange ideas, inform themselves and others about current developments and build a network of personal relations. The main topics of ENTER 96 are business engineering and standardisation, covering a wide area of subjects like the redesign of touristic products and the processes of their production. This covers, however, not only single business processes but also the entire value chain in tourism, ending up in redesign of distribution channel and changing relations among principals, tour operators, travel agents and customers. Standardisation increasingly becomes a prerequisite for interorganisational coordination and cooperation, EDI is slowly being introduced in tourism and Internet related standards like HTML and VRML. will have a major impact on the future development of electronic distribution platforms for services in tourism. As the proceedings underscore, ENTER has been established as an international platform for scientific and practical discourse on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism. The close interdisciplinary link between technological and economic questions in tourism opens up new, promising threads for applied research and development likewise.

Hannes Werthner

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