Organizers
Dr Kenneth Boff – Tennenbaum Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor William Rouse – Tennenbaum Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology
Professor Penelope Sanderson – NICTA and The University of Queensland

Understanding and influencing change is a central concern of design, commerce and societies. Well-intended interventions often lead to unexpected outcomes with significant implications for health, safety, security and prosperity. While considerable intellectual investment has been directed at quantitative and statistical approaches to understanding causality of change of socio-technical systems, the complexity and indeterminate nature of underlying states and often nonlinear dynamics of such systems pose significant, if not intractable, measurement, computational, and interpretation challenges. As a result, a scalable and functional understanding of underlying causal dynamics of socio-technical systems that can inform real-world interventions leading to desired outcomes remains elusive.

This invitation-only workshop will address what is needed in order to close the gaps resulting from the limitations of current approaches. In particular, discussions will focus on what can be learned from underlying patterns of causal relationships, the fundamental constraints and best options for coupling multiple approaches and methodologies to "capture" real world scope, scale and complexity of dynamic events and what can be learned about underlying causal dynamics from case-based successes and failures. A key outcome of the workshop will the identification of R&D options likely to push the states-of-the-art of understanding, prediction and intervention in complex socio-technical systems.

The workshop will be highly interdisciplinary, drawing upon history, economics, philosophy; social and behavioral sciences; mathematics, physics, engineering, computing, enterprise and military systems and design. The level of exposition will be accessible by people from all these disciplines.

The workshop will be followed by (1) a special issue journal - Information • Knowledge • Systems Management and (2) an edited volume- Complex Socio-Technical Systems: Understanding and Influencing Causality of Change (IOS Press: Amsterdam).