A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.

This book highlights recent advances in Cybernetics, Machine Learning and Cognitive Science applied to Communications Engineering and Technologies, and presents high-quality research conducted by experts in this area. It provides a valuable reference guide for students, researchers and industry practitioners who want to keep abreast of the latest developments in this dynamic, exciting and interesting research field of communication engineering, driven by next-generation IT-enabled techniques. The book will also benefit practitioners whose work involves the development of communication systems using advanced cybernetics, data processing, swarm intelligence and cyber-physical systems; applied mathematicians; and developers of embedded and real-time systems. Moreover, it shares insights into applying concepts from Machine Learning, Cognitive Science, Cybernetics and other areas of artificial intelligence to wireless and mobile systems, control systems and biomedical engineering.

This book presents a unique, step-by-step approach for monitoring, detecting, analyzing and mitigating complex network cyber threats. It includes updated processes in response to asymmetric threats, as well as descriptions of the current tools to mitigate cyber threats. Featuring comprehensive computer science material relating to a complete network baseline with the characterization hardware and software configuration, the book also identifies potential emerging cyber threats and the vulnerabilities of the network architecture to provide students with a guide to responding to threats. The book is intended for undergraduate and graduate college students who are unfamiliar with the cyber paradigm and processes in responding to attacks.

Society is now facing challenges for which the traditional management toolbox is increasingly inadequate. Well-grounded theoretical frameworks, such as systems thinking and cybernetics, offer general level interpretation schemes and models that are capable of supporting understanding of complex phenomena and are not impacted by the passage of time. This book serves the knowledge society to address the complexity of decision making and problem solving in the 21st century with contributions from systems and cybernetics. A multi-disciplinary approach has been adopted to support diversity and to develop inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge within the shared thematic of problem solving and decision making in the 21st century. Its conceptual thread is cyber/systemic thinking, and its realisation is supported by a wide network of scientists on the basis of a highly participative agenda. The book provides a platform of knowledge sharing and conceptual frameworks developed with multi-disciplinary perspectives, which are useful to better understand the fast changing scenario and the complexity of problem solving in the present time.

From the researcher who was one of the first to identify and analyze the infamous industrial control system malware "Stuxnet," comes a book that takes a new, radical approach to making Industrial control systems safe from such cyber attacks: design the controls systems themselves to be "robust." Other security experts advocate risk management, implementing more firewalls and carefully managing passwords and access. Not so this book: those measures, while necessary, can still be circumvented. Instead, this book shows in clear, concise detail how a system that has been set up with an eye toward quality design in the first place is much more likely to remain secure and less vulnerable to hacking, sabotage or malicious control. It blends several well-established concepts and methods from control theory, systems theory, cybernetics and quality engineering to create the ideal protected system. The book's maxim is taken from the famous quality engineer William Edwards Deming, "If I had to reduce my message to management to just a few words, I'd say it all has to do with reducing variation." Highlights include: - An overview of the problem of "cyber fragility" in industrial control systems - How to make an industrial control system "robust," including principal design objectives and overall strategic planning - Why using the methods of quality engineering like the Taguchi method, SOP and UML will help to design more "armored" industrial control systems.

A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.

This book presents real-world problems and pioneering research that reflect novel approaches to cybernetics, algorithms and software engineering in the context of intelligent systems. It gathers the peer-reviewed proceedings of the 2nd Computational Methods in Systems and Software 2018 (CoMeSySo 2018), a conference that broke down traditional barriers by being held online. The goal of the event was to provide an international forum for discussing the latest high-quality research results.

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

Application of New Cybernetics in Physics describes the application of new cybernetics to physical problems and the resolution of basic physical paradoxes by considering external observer influence. This aids the reader in solving problems that were solved incorrectly or have not been solved. Three groups of problems of the new cybernetics are considered in the book: (a) Systems that can be calculated based on known physics of subsystems. This includes the external observer influence calculated from basic physical laws (ideal dynamics) and dynamics of a physical system influenced even by low noise (observable dynamics). (b) Emergent systems. This includes external noise from the observer by using the black box model (complex dynamics), external noise from the observer by using the observer's intuition (unpredictable dynamics), defining boundaries of application of scientific methods for system behavior prediction, and the role of the observer's intuition for unpredictable systems. (c) Methods for solution of basic physical paradoxes by using methods of the new cybernetics: the entropy increase paradox, Schrödinger's cat paradox (wave package reduction in quantum mechanics), the black holes information paradox, and the time wormholes grandfather paradox. All of the above paradoxes have the same resolution based on the principles of new cybernetics. Indeed, even a small interaction of an observer with an observed system results in their time arrows' alignment (synchronization) and results in the paradox resolution and appearance of the universal time arrow. - Provides solutions to the basic physical paradoxes and demonstrates their practical actuality for modern physics - Describes a wide class of molecular physics and kinetic problems to present semi-analytical and semi-qualitative calculations of solvation, flame propagation, and high-molecular formation - Demonstrates the effectiveness in application to complex molecular systems and other many-component objects - Includes numerous illustrations to support the text