The VisCoSo Project: Detection of Crisis in Socio-Material Systems on Visual-Cognitive-Social Processes

The project will concentrate on the detection of critical situations through visual-cognitive-social processes. We argue that, in such processes, vision influences what agents believe, their beliefs determine them to interact in a certain way and sustain their institutions, the rules they are subject to or their previous interactions may let emerge beliefs and expectations, that may influence what they see and how they see it, and so on. In a socio-material system, both humans and technical devices participate in and enact such processes. Many disciplines, ranging from philosophy to cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and sociology, have dealt with such phenomena, often focusing only on a part of the process and neglecting the others. An ontological model will be built that captures the insights coming from different disciplines, reached with their own specific paradigms, making use of their own concepts and methodologies.