Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology

Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, althoug...

Cybernetics is the study of human/machine interaction guided by the principle that numerous different types of systems can be studied according to principles of feedback, control, and communications. The field has a quantitative component, inherited from feedback control and information theory, but is primary a qualitative, analytical tool – one might even say a philosophy of technology. Cybern...

To operate with (or in, or from) the discipline of cybernetics is to engage with the concepts and guides-to-action elucidated by Heinz von Foerster. It is impossible for us to do otherwise, because his work ““stands under”” the praxis of circular-causal reasoning, second-order thinking-acting, and ethical viewpoints. Elucidate is a fitting word because it comes from a root meaning to shine a li...

This paper tells the story of Jens Glad Balchen (1926-2009), a Norwegian research scientist and engineer who is widely regarded as the father of Engineering Cybernetics in Norway. In 1954, he founded what would later become the Department of Automatic Control at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. This name was changed to the Department of Engineering Cybernetics in 1972 to refl...

Abstract: The paper gives a basis for solving many problems of numerically reliable synthesis of sub-optimal discrete-time control in H∞. The approach is based on J-lossless factorisations of the delta-domain chain-scattering descriptions of continuous-time plants being controlled. Relevant properties of poles and zeros of chainscattering models are given. Necessary and sufficient conditions fo...

S ince the end of World War II, I have been working on the many ramifications of the theory of messages. Besides the electrical engineering theory of the transmission of messages, there is a larger field which includes not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain r...