Helga Nowotny

Helga Nowotny is Professor emerita of Science and Technology Studies, ETH Zurich and Founding Member and Former President of the European Research Council. After a distinguished career at universities and research institutions in several European countries she continues to be actively engaged in research and innovation policy at national, European and international level, among them as Member of the Board of Trustees, Falling Walls Foundation, Berlin; Vice-President of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings; Senior Fellow at the School of Transnational Governance, EUI, Florence; Member of the Council IEA de Paris; Member of the Austrian Council for Sciences, Technology, and Innovation; Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna.

She has received many awards and honorary doctorates including from the University of Oxford and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. She has published widely in Science and Technology Studies, STS, and on social time. Her latest book publications include The Cunning of Uncertainty (2016) and In AI We Trust (2021) which has since been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese and German. Currently Helga Nowotny is also working on the Socioscope project that develops a pioneering methodology to study societal transitions in the domain of food production, transportation and consumption. It is a new way of doing social science research by collecting high quality “thick” data with standardized multi-methods across continents, something that has rarely been applied when studying social phenomena.

The project

Title: The Food Socioscope: a new instrument to better understand Transitions towards greater sustainability

"The Food Socioscope project aims to understand the systemic transition towards greater sustainability in the food sector. It has two main components: a participatory data collection with a community directory, and a comprehensive research effort. The first component builds a community of practitioners from various sectors (e.g., companies, NGOs, public authorities) who manage initiatives promoting food sustainability. This community, facilitated by the Food Socioscope Netboard, fosters knowledge exchange by publishing key characteristics of these initiatives online. The second component collects qualitative data through in-depth field interviews, site visits and videos with practitioners, following a rigorously tested protocol. This in-depth data, capturing activities from micro to macro levels, feeds into the research project to improve understanding of systemic change in food sustainability. The research spans the entire food supply chain and examines the supporting infrastructure and organizational setups. By analysing 600 initiatives, worldwide, within their broader contexts, the project aims to identify mechanisms of transition, including barriers and success factors. To collect, process and analyse its vast amount of qualitative data, in multiple languages, the project uses novel protocols, AI models, network analysis, and other quantitative methods. This paper presents the project and preliminary findings regarding regulation, the asymmetry of social contracts and the practitioners' motivations."

Hosting institution: Institut d'Études Avancées Paris (IEA)

Selective Bibliography

• Nowotny, Helga, “The Re-Enchanted Universe of AI: the Place for Human Agency”, to be published in: Introduction to Digital Humanism, Editors: H. Werthner, C. Ghezzi, J. Kramer, J. Nida-Rümelin, B. Nuseibeh, E. Prem, A. Stanger, 2023, Springer Nature.
• Nowotny, Helga, “Digital Humanism – Navigating the Tensions Ahead” in H. Werthner, E. Prem, E. A. Lee, and C. Ghezzi (eds): Perspectives on Digital Humanism, Springer, 2022. (BibTeX).
• Nowotny, Helga, “In AI We Trust. Power. Illusion and Control of Predictive Algorithms”, Polity Press; 2021 “Le macchine di Dio. Gli algoritmi predittivi e l'illusione del controllo”, LUISS University Press, 2022 ; “La fe en la inteligencia artificial. Los algoritmos predictivos y el futuro de la humanidad”, Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022, 未來的錯覺, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2023; “Die KI sei mit euch. Macht, Illusion und Kontrolle algorithmischer Vorhersage”, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2023.
• Nowotny, Helga, “The Illusion of Control: Living with digital Others” to be published in: “The Illusion of Control: Living with the digital Others”, in Global Perspectives, special issue “illusion of Control” forthcoming 2024, (S.E. van der Leeuw, V. Galaz, J.-W. Vasbinder,