Scientists and engineers have long been aware of the tension between narrow specialization and multidisciplinary cooperation, but now a major transformation is in process that will require technical fields to combine far more effectively than formerly in the service of human benefit. This handbook will catalog all the ways this can be accomplished and the reasons it must be. Nature is a single coherent system and diverse methods of scientific and engineering investigations should reflect this interlinked and dynamic unity. Accordingly, general concepts and ideas should be developed systematically in interdependence, with cause-and-effect pathways, for improved outcomes in knowledge, technology and applications. At the same time, industrial and social applications rely on integration of disciplines and unification of knowledge. Thus, convergence is both a fundamental principle of nature and a timely opportunity for human progress. This handbook will represent the culmination of fifteen years of workshops, conferences and publications that initially explored the connections between nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and new technologies based on cognitive science. A constant emphasis on human benefit then drew in the social sciences, even as shared scientific and ethical principles brought in sustainability of the Earth environment and the challenge of equitable economic advancement. The intellectual contributions of literally hundreds of scientists and engineers established a number of research methods and analytical principles that could unite disparate fields. The culmination has been called Convergence of Knowledge and Technology for the benefit of Society (CKTS), defined as the escalating and transformative interactions among seemingly different disciplines, technologies, communities and domains of human activity to achieve mutual compatibility, synergism and integration.
About the Author: William Sims Bainbridge is an American sociologist and co-director of Human-Centered Computing at the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is the first Senior Fellow to be appointed by the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and most well-known for his work on the sociology of religion. He has published extensively on the sociology of computer gaming and he has pioneered the use of online virtual worlds for scientific conferences and research proposal review panels. He has previously edited two major reference works, The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction and Leadership in Science and Technology. He has published numerous books with Springer. Mihail C. Roco is the Senior Advisor for Nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a key architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. He is the founding Chair of the U.S. National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Nano scale Science, Engineering and Technology (NSET) and established the Nanotechnology Group of the International Risk Governance Council. Dr. Roco is a corresponding member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences and a member of the International Risk Governance Council. His research included experimental and simulation methods to investigate nanosystems. He is a Fellow of ASME, Fellow of AIChE and Fellow of the Institute of Physics and was elected Engineer of the Year by the U.S. Society of Professional Engineers and NSF in 1999 and in 2004. He was honored as recipient of the Carl Duisberg Award in Germany, the 'Burgers Professorship Award' in The Netherlands and the 'University Research Professorship' and Fingerson/TSI awards in the U.S. In addition to being the Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Journal of Nanoparticle Research, he is credited with thirteen patents and has contributed over two hundred archival articles in sixteen books.