The Vienna Centre for Societal Security (VICESSE) and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology are happy to announce their collaboration to host a new Social-Science Track on the 1st June 2022 at the International Digital Security Forum (IDSF) in Vienna, Austria on the theme:
“Understanding the challenges of digital societies.”
The spread of digital technologies is changing societies in often unpredictable ways. Some of these changes are disruptive and receive broad public attention, others are creeping, staying beyond the radar. Also, these changes escape traditional models: they increase societal resilience and vulnerability, they broaden and limit the range of personal and cultural choice, they open new public spaces and narrow the share of voice. Pace and direction of digital technology innovation are unevenly spread across the social realm and escape established tools of unified political governance.
Citizens need to be protected, empowered and enabled vis-à-vis digitalisation, policy makers need to be aware of emerging opportunities and threats and, last not least, system developers and industry, driving digital innovation need to understand how to profitably create added value for their end-users and customers while avoiding unintended side effects.
Approaching these challenges from a social-science perspective can trigger productive irritation, deliver new insights and broaden the horizon of analysis. Conceptual and empirical investigations of digitalisation processes provide evidence-based insights to put popular dystopian and utopian scenarios of digitalisation into perspective. They can help to better understand the transformations that turn humans into machine-readable techno-social hybrids, create and sustain a virtual space beyond any geographical and political barriers or transform the sphere of commerce in the age of liquid modernity towards symbolic production and trade in intangibles.
The social-sciences track at the IDSF 2022 provides a unique opportunity to discuss insights from novel research undertakings on digital societies with a diverse international audience – academic and non-academic alike. This also includes stakeholders from the private sector, from the national and international governments and public bodies, such as the United Nations, OSCE or the European Commission, as well as from non-governmental organisations.
We invite research-papers, concepts and discussion-papers from social science scholars, interdisciplinary teams including non-social science disciplines such as from the computer science, and papers which incorporate non-academic collaborators, contributing to one of the following general topics:
- Humans and machines – techno-social hybrids and autonomous agents
- How to identify and investigate risks and threats of digitalisation across the social realm
- User-centred systems design or system-centred user design – bridging the gap between technology developers and end users
- A conceptual glossary and vocabulary for socio-technical analysis
Information on abstracts and submission:
- A 300-word abstract is required.
- The deadline for abstracts is 15th February 2022.
- Abstracts should be submitted via the following form.
- Review Results and information to the authors by 15th of March 2022.
The abstracts will be reviewed by a panel involving experts from different scientific disciplines, technological industries and public bodies.
Research Papers accepted for the conference will be considered for further development and publication as an edited volume or a special issue in a relevant, international journal.
More information can be found here. The deadline for abstracts is 15th February 2022.