In this 1st of May 2011, the ASSYST/CSS Newsletter presents three distinct initiatives, all concerned, each one in its own way, by the role of Science in building a better society for the future. The first is the Assyst Meeting “ICT Based Policies for a Green Knowledge Society”, that will be held in Florence on the 27th May. The meeting will address processes of creating, sharing, and using knowledge for socio-economic development. In this context, “green” means an interest for the involvement of environmental concern. The key issue of the meeting will be the exploration of the possibility of achieving a green knowledge society with the utilization of the ICT, as a means of enhancing interaction and a distributed intelligence on the overall society.
Another important event is “fet’11 – The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition”, to be held in Budapest already on the 4-6 May. fet’11 is a forum dedicated to frontier research in information and communication technologies, a unique conference on visionary, high-risk and long-term research in information science and technology. Featuring an exceptionally broad range of scientific fields, the event will seed new ideas across disciplines that will reshape the future.
Finally, the EPSRC and ASSYST workshop “Mathematics in the Science of Complex Systems”, to be held at the University of Warwick on the 9th and 10th June, will challenge the status quo and suggest that there is an exciting universe of new mathematical structures waiting to be constructed – new kinds of spaces with new kinds of algebraic, topological, analytic and logical properties requiring new methods of investigation to make them tractable and comprehensible.