Special Issue on Cybernetics and Cognitive Informatics

—The three greatest theories in science and engineering developed in the 1940s are cybernetics, information theory, and systems theory. Cybernetics is the science of communication and control in humans, machines, organizations, and societies across the reductive hierarchy of neural, cognitive, functional, and logical levels. A contemporary form of cybernetics, known as cognitive informatics (CI), is a transdisciplinary inquiry of cognitive and information sciences that investigates into the internal information processing mechanisms and processes of the brain and natural intelligence and their engineering applications via an interdisci-plinary approach. This special issue on cybernetics and CI fo-cuses on the theme of " convergence of CI and cybernetics, " which investigates the shared foundations of cybernetics and CI and their impacts on cybernetic and cognitive systems. This editorial demonstrates that the investigation into CI and cybernetics may encouragingly result in fundamental discoveries toward the development of next-generation intelligent systems and cognitive computing technologies. C YBERNETICS, delineated by Wiener in 1948, is the science of communication and autonomous control in both machines and living things. In his seminal work entitled Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [43], Wiener initiated the field of cybernetics to provide a mathematical means for studying adaptive and autonomous systems. Cybernetics mimics information communicated in machines with that of the brain and nervous systems. It also attempts to elaborate human behavior by cybernetic Cybernetics constitutes one of the roots of modern cognitive science and computational intelligence. Definition 1: Cybernetics is the science of communication and control in humans, machines, organizations, and societies across the reductive hierarchy of neural, cognitive, functional, and logical levels. Studies in cybernetics cover biologically, cognitively, and intelligently motivated computational paradigms such as vision, neural networks, genetic algorithms, fuzzy systems, autonomic systems, cognitive systems, computational intelligence, and robotics. The domain and architecture of contemporary cybernetics encompass a wide range of coherent fields from the machine, natural, and organizational intelligence to social intelligence in the horizontal scopes and from the logical, functional, and cognitive models to neural (biological) models in the vertical reductive hierarchy. Therefore, cybernetics in nature is a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiry of cognitive information processing and autonomic systems. The scope of contemporary cybernetics has been extended from mainly machine intelligence to natural, organizational, and societal intelligence. Its reductive framework has been enriched from logical and functional models to cognitive and neural models. A number of emerging fields have developed in …