Pierre Levy of the University of Ottawa

Pierre Lévy is a philosopher with a focus on the understanding of cultural and cognitive implications of digital technologies, promoting human collective intelligence.

He has written a dozen books on the subject, translated in as many languages and studied in universities across the world. He is currently teaching at the communication department of the University of Ottawa, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence. His book The technologies of intelligence, published in 1990, forecasted the advent of the Web.

He founded Trivium, the first software company dedicated to knowledge management. His most popular book, Collective intelligence, written twenty years ago, has become a classic to be reviewed from time to time for its visionary outlook on digital culture. Pierre Lévy is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has received several awards and academic distinctions.

His latest book The Semantic Sphere, expounds a scientific method to use the Internet as a reflexive observatory of human collective intelligence.

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Pierre Lévy will present the artificial language IEML (Information Economy Meta Language) that he has invented, endowed with computable semantics. A dynamic text in IEML self-translates in natural languages, it computes its internal semantic networks and its semantic relationships with other IEML dynamic texts. A set of IEML dynamic texts self-organizes into a dynamic hypertext. Therefore, data categorized in IEML compute automatically the dynamic hypertext of their semantic relationships. This embodies, for Pierre Levy, “The Future of Text”.