(Last change: Jan 8, 2024)

This blog started in 2003 as an outlet for some university lectures of Gerd Doeben-Henisch, at that time Professor of the Frankfurt University of Applied sciences (doeben@fb2.fra-uas.de) within the department of Computer Science & Engineering.

During that time Gerd made some ‘thought experiments’ confronting his teaching (‘Real Time Systems’, ‘Man-Machine Interaction’, ‘Learning Systems’, …) with his education in ‘Philosophy of Science’ (PhD at the Ludwig Maximilians University , Munich, 1989). It became clear, that it is possible to ‘rewrite’ the usual stuff within formal structures representing theories. He intensified these ‘thought experiments’ using the topic of ‘MMI’ (Man-Machine Interaction, often called in the literature HCI or HMI or …). At that time (starting in 1999) he had an intensive communication with Dr. Louwrence Erasmus, a highly experienced Systems Engineer from South Africa. Out of these discussions it developed an integrated view of Engineering, Philosophy of Science and Computer Science turning MMI into a complete formalized theory describing that process, which enables stakeholders, engineers and other experts to solve a problem with an expected outcome.

During 2018 Gerd was confronted with the new challenge that the planning of complete communities as sustainable cities appeared as highly ‘unsystematic’; especially the requirement to include the ‘citizens themselves’ in this whole process seemed to be unsolved.

This inspired Gerd to try to transfer the systematic concept of MMI-Engineering to ‘communal planning’: define and organize the engineering process such that all citizens can participate in the communal planning process, that all scientific standards are used and that there exists at least one software tool, to support such a process directly, only using ‘everyday language’.

Since 2020 this project has been additionally been inspired by the concept of ‘sustainability’ by distinguishing clearly between ‘sustainability 1’ (main focus on resources) and ‘sustainability 2 (main focus on the people responsible for the usage of resources).

This lead during the last years to a ‘unified concept’ starting with philosophy of science as the main conceptual framework to elaborate the concrete topics ‘sustainability’, ‘citizens talking’, and ‘democracy’ a bit more.

All the formal stuff (philosophy of science, theory concepts, mathematics, logic, software, ..) is separated from these topics and is — more or less — located in this uffmm-blog. The explanation of this new software, meanwhile version 3, is planned to start in February 2024 (we are ‘slow’ because we are ‘short in resources’ :-)).

The more general — and popular — philosophical thinking is located in the cognitiveagent.org blog. The main emphasis there is the question for a new ‘image of man’ beyond all the traditional concepts and also beyond the actual discussions around so-called ‘artificial intelligence’.

The concepts of ‘citizens talking’ in democracies and with sustainability is described in the blog ‘oksimo.org’ with real examples of university student projects and more and more projects with real citizens in real cities with real problems.

A more condensed format …

I am a philosopher, theologian, and cognitive scientist. Since 2001 I have held a substitute professorship and since 2005 a full professorship in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. My main focus from 2005 onwards was ‘Artificial Intelligence(AI) embedded in the concept of learning systems’, ‘Human Machine Interaction (MMI)’ and ‘Simulation’. During this time I was able to accompany about a hundred interdisciplinary projects across the many disciplines of my University . I am interested in the basic structures of life, the logic of evolution, the emergence of knowledge (‘mind’), the possibilities of computer-based intelligence, the interactions between culture and technology, the possible ‘meaning’ of ‘life’ in the ‘universe’. As of April 1, 2017, I am an emeritus (but still active :-)). Besides selected courses (mainly: ‘Citizen Science for Sustainable Development’) I am increasingly working in an integrated project with theory, new type of software and social implementation. Besides this blog uffmm.org the author writes also in the German blog cognitiveagent.org (with more than 500 posts), as well as oksimo.org (200 posts) … yes, I was once a ‘monk’, too, for 22 years with a lot of mysticism, theology and philosophy, especially philosophy of Science and modern Logic; including some years as a youth social worker.