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 interdisciplinary approach. This special issue on cybernetics and CI focuses 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.