Venue Logistics Motivation Program Participants (partial list) Contributors Sponsors

Venue

Our goal is not to collect answers or state of the art talks, but rather to debate and list educated questions as to the issues and tools that lay before researchers interested in information as a possibly evolving, yet central notion of our era. We expect the workshop to develop precisely as a reflection of the participants vision and taste. With luck, we hope to collect views and recommendations in a lean reference for the future.

Although pariticipation in the workshop is by invitation only, a limited number of seats may be available.

Logistics

There is plenty of hotels in Venice (about 350 in Greater Venice, of which approximately 10% in Venice-Lido), but as with one of the prime cultural and tourist destinations in the World you may expect Venice to be booked throughout the year. We strongly encourage early reservations by participants and their accompanying persons. For basic and relatively inexpensive but clean and modern accommodation, the following are close to the Istituto Veneto and often used by participants.

• Domus Ciliota www.ciliota.it Single 80 Euros, Double 130 Euros (included breakfast)
• Artigianelli www.donorione-venezia.it Single 80 Euros, Double 132 Euros (included breakfast, 3 and 4 beds also available)
• Foresteria Levi Foundation www.fondazionelevi.it Single 70 Euros, Double 105 Euros (included breakfast, 3 and 4 beds also available)

Motivation

Information is the basic commodity of our era. We propose to advance a comprehensive science of information, offering a wealth of societal benefits in diverse engineering, scientific, and social applications. We integrate research and teaching activities that investigate information from all angles: from the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of information to the science and engineering of novel substrates, biological networks, chemistry, communication networks, economics, physics, and complex cognitive networks.

In 1948, the Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon proposed a foundational definition of information that serves as the backbone for the classical paradigm in digital communication. Shannon statistical information quantifies the extent to which a recipient of data can reduce its statistical uncertainty. However, it does not yet provide an adequate formalism and overarching answers for extraction, comprehension, and manipulation of information in scientific and social domains. A comprehensive theory of information for complex systems like biological and chemical processes or social and communications networks has been elusive. Thus, while we can describe and design complex systems, we still lack fundamental understanding of them.

As a result, we have yet to answer (or even productively formulate) fundamental questions such as: what is information in a broader sense? how is information created and in what ways can it be transferred? how can we incorporate space, time, semantics and context into formal measures of information? how much information is embodied in structures (of molecules or websites)? what is the value of information in financial transactions or social interactions? Lack of understanding of such questions severely impedes the progress of science and engineering.

Some of the challenges we face today are:

1. We still lack measures and meters to define and appraise the amount of structure and organization embodied in artifacts and natural objects alike, a deficiency that antagonizes the development of many useful theories and applications, notably, in the biomedical sector.
2. Information accumulates at a rate faster than it can be sifted through, accessed and digested by humans, so that the bottleneck, traditionally represented by the medium, is drifting towards the receiving end of the channel.
3. Timeliness is an important dimension of Information. Time and space varying situations are hardly touched by Shannon Information (in Shannon theory one bit of Information sent over a network is received as one bit whether it arrives within a second or withing a day and we know it is not the same Information; similar situations arise in business, biology, life science, etc).
4. In a growing number of situations, the overhead in accessing Information prevails over that of fruition, which makes information itself practically unattainable or obsolete.
5. Capabilities akin to contents addressing and semantic access and transmission are not even in sight, while computing and communication infrastructures of the new Millennium induce drastic mutations on the conventional notions of Knowing and Learning, Guessing and Discovering.
6. Microscopic systems seem not to obey Shannon postulates of Information. In the quantum world and on the level of living cells traditional Information often fails to accurately describe reality.

The workshop is expected to have significant, broader, and potentially transformative impacts beyond the basic science of information. This broad-based effort will hopefully lead to the development of an active and thriving interdisciplinary community of students and researchers. We will seek to foster such a community within academia, industry and commerce, and to broaden its scope to national and international levels. On the discovery side, we aspire to help develop novel characterizations of biological networks and chemical processes directing self assembly of molecules, to identify fraudulent financial transactions, build more efficient cognitive networks, and to create better search engine infrastructure.

Program

Participants (partial list)

Contributors

Sponsors

	European Office of Aerospace Research and Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, United States Air Force Research Laboratory
	http://www.london.af.mil/
	Office of Naval Research Global
	http://www.onrglobal.navy.mil/
	University of Padova
	http://www.dei.unipd.it/
	Poznan University of Technology
	http://www.cie.put.poznan.pl/
	University of Padova - Department of Information Engineering
	http://www.dei.unipd.it/wdyn/?IDsezione=2
	Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti'
	http://www.istitutoveneto.it/ivinglese/index.html
	Mobilfuture
	http://www.mobilfuture.com/