Contents


Preface

When I was invited to edit and put together this book, as part of the Women in Science Competition in 2018 proposed by IntechOpen, I was very excited to get the opportunity to put together a collection of works in the field of communication that would resonate with the idea of pursuing a fundamental thread of how communication has evolved on life on Earth, from the very building blocks of life such as DNA or cells, to supra-human organisms such as institutions and computer systems.

The idea of finding universal, fundamental patterns of communication arose while I was working on a computational model of information exchange that could find its applications in molecular biology as well as in artificial intelligence. While researching this idea, I came across a wide variety of research from most fields of study, such as biology, anthropology, history, marketing, economics, information sciences, psychology, social sciences, to name only a few. Particularly in biology, psychology, and marketing or business, topics such as animal communication or communication with children or effective communication in business seemed very large, broad, and predominant, but without much reference between each other or across disciplines. This gap in the current literature and the siloed research within fields spurred the idea of trying to find what is common and fundamental in com-

A first step towards opening the dialogue and research on common threads of communication in various and different systems was done by the publication of the book "Emergence of Communication in Socio-Biological Networks" at Springer in 2018. But this has only scratched the surface and, given the wide diversity of the fields and researchers involved, the next logical step was to gather into a collection the works of worldwide researchers that are intimately familiar with specific aspects

This book is highly curated, as the chapters published here are not the typical research on communication specific to each field, but research on communication as a complex system that can be read and understood across disciplines and that can address a wider audience than within one's specialty. This effort shows again how big the gap is in the cross-disciplinary approach of communication, how open and wide the field is and how important it is to keep on pursuing in this search for

As this is another important step in the discovery of fundamental communication patterns, I am confident that it is also only another open door to an even wider and broader body of research and therefore I see this book as an invitation for the current and future scientists and scholars to look at this phenomenon through the

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the authors that put in a great deal of effort into their papers and for submitting their work to this edition, to the

lenses of complex systems, multidisciplinary and universality.

munication between these seemingly different subfields.

of communication.

knowledge.
