Perspectives on Digital Humanism

This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series.

Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs.

​Hannes Werthner is a retired Professor for E-Commerce at the TU Wien. From 2016 to 2019 he served also as the dean of the Faculty Prior to joining TU Wien, he had professorships at Austrian and international Universities. His research is in E-Commerce and E-Tourism, Recommender Systems, and in Network Analysis. Besides research and teaching he was and is active in starting new initiatives, such as the Vienna PhD School of Informatics. the i2c (Informatics Innovation Center), the initiative to support refugees welcome.TU.code, and recently, the Digital Humanism Initiative. Since 2011 the International Federation for IT and Tourism (IFITT) grants the "Hannes Werthner Tourism and Technology Lifetime Achievement Award" to outstanding academics and/or professionals in the field.

Erich Prem is chief RTI strategy advisor and CEO of eutema GmbH. He is an internationally renowned expert in research and innovation strategy with more than two decades of work experience in research and innovation management and RTDI policy. Erich Prem is a certified managerial economist and works scientifically in artificial intelligence, research politics, innovation research and epistemology. He was a guest researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked at the Austrian Research Institute of AI and a lecturer at TU Vienna's Informatics Innovation Center. He received his MBA in General Management from Donau University.

Edward A. Lee has been working on embedded software systems for 40 years. After studying and working at Yale, MIT, and Bell Labs, he landed at Berkeley, where he is now Professor of the Graduate School in EECS. His research is focused on cyber-physical systems. He is the lead author of the open-source software system Ptolemy II, author of textbooks on embedded systems and digital communications, and has recently been writing books on philosophical and social implications of technology. His current research is focused on a polyglot coordination language for distributed real-time systems called Lingua Franca that combines features of discrete-event modeling, synchronous languages, and actors. His recent books are The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures and Humans and Machines (2020), Plato and the Nerd: The Creative Partnership of Humans and Technology (2017), and Introduction to Embedded Systems: A Cyber-Physical System Approach (2017, with Sanjit Seshia).

Carlo Ghezzi is an Emeritus Professor at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), where he has been teaching and doing research for over 40 years. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, member of Academia Europaea, and member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (Istituto Lombardo). He has been awarded the ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and the Distinguished Service Award, and the IEEE TCSE Distinguished Education Award. He received the Honorary Doctorate from TU Wien. He has been President of Informatics Europe. He has been Program Co-Chair, General Chair, and program committee member of numerous international conferences. He has been Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Associate Editor of Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Science of Computer Programming. He has done research on programming languages and software engineering. He has published over 200 papers in international journals and conferences and co-authored 7 books. He is interested in the ethical implications of research in computer science. He is currently chairing the Ethics Committee at Politecnico di Milano.