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The FuturICT project is part of the European Commission’s Flagship Programme which plans, beginning in 2012, to invest one billion Euros in funding over ten years to foster research initiatives of unprecedented scope and dimension. The principal goal of FuturICT -- as described in a proposal to the European Commission and various other documents -- is to apply revolutionary advances in computing technology to transform our understanding of human societies and economies as well as our collective interaction with the Earth's ecosystem. The project aims to combine the best expertise across all scientific disciplines — from computer science, physics, mathematics, environmental science and economics through psychology, ecology, anthropology and sociology — to set up supercomputing facilities, networked systems and laboratories, creating a new kind of data-rich social science on which to base intelligent, sustainable and resilient future policies.

FuturICT is currently funded by the European Commission for one year (beginning in May 2011) as a pilot project (it is one of six such pilots). During this period, project participants are working to consolidate the vision of the project and to develop a firm plan for the ten years’ work (including scientific and technical strategy, management structure and legal framework). The final Flagship proposal will be compiled at the end of the 2011, and the European Commission will make a final decision on Flagship funding in 2012. FuturICT participants currently include more than 200 teams of scientists from over 80 renowned universities and institutions throughout Europe, with collaborations all over the world.

Motivation and Overview
Humanity faces urgent and profound challenges ranging from environmental change and shortages of natural resources through to financial and economic instability, all linked to our difficulties in managing our collective activities and their consequences. The FuturICT project proposes to exploit the unprecedented power of modern information technology to meet these challenges through a historic scientific project akin to the Apollo effort to put men on the Moon.

In recent decades, revolutionary advances in computing and information technology and in the science of complex systems, coupled with the availability of new and rich data sources, have fundamentally changed the nature of science and its capabilities. In the past, supercomputers have been used mainly in physics, biology or engineering. Now they are increasingly being applied for social and economic analyses, where they aid the human mind to penetrate through entangled webs of cause and effect which govern systems involving millions of people. Large-scale computer simulations represent the best chance to gain insight into highly complex problems ranging from traffic flows to evacuation scenarios of entire cities, the spreading of epidemics, financial and economic instabilities, the occurrence and dynamics of conflicts, or patterns and impacts of environmental change.

In view of these new possibilities, scientists behind the FuturICT project propose to combine the best expertise across all scientific disciplines to set up facilities on an unprecedented scale for data-rich social science on which intelligent future policies can be based. The project web site offers extensive details on the Flagship's intended activities and research initiatives. Among its stated goals are the establishment of several specific facilities using massive ICT able to support the development of intelligent and adaptive science-based policies. These include the following:

The Living Earth Platform:
The entire globe, its ecosystem, our human societies and economies together make up one tightly linked complex system involving millions of feedbacks. Only by simulating the system as a whole, FuturICT scientists argue, can we hope to gain real knowledge about the potential consequences of human activities. The project aims to develop a Living Earth Platform capable of simulating the human components of this system -- while providing a direct interface to parallel ecosystem simulations -- so as to establish an experimental platform for testing strategies for a sustainable future.

Interactive Observatories:
The most important changes in human systems as well as in most natural systems often take place in rare crises or catastrophes which appear as sudden and unanticipated "storms." To gain early warnings of such important events, the FuturICT project proposes to develop 'Interactive Observatories,' envisioned as laboratories devoted to gathering and processing enormous volumes of data on natural systems, such as the Earth and its ecosystems, as well as on human social and technological systems. Simulations from the Living Earth Platform may then be used, in conjunction with complementary equation-based models, to help policy makers test different scenarios and conduct knowledge-based crisis management. Decision-makers will be supported by the visualisation of complex scenarios, and the capacity to explore the influence of non-obvious and counter-intuitive feedbacks, cascades and side effects.

An Innovation Accelerator:
Innovation in science, engineering or business requires timely communication and coordination between parties with complementary knowledge and skills. To break down the barriers which prevent or slow innovation, the project also proposes to develop an automated ICT system for communications and rapid knowledge dissemination which will help business people, politicians and scientists contact the best experts for a project, and support the flexible coordination of large-scale projects, encouraging cooperative creation. The envisioned system would aid the early collective identification of emerging trends, allowing timely investment in key technologies. Multi-factorial reputation and recommender systems will connect producers and consumer communities more closely, simplifying everything from crowd sourcing and prediction markets to personalised education.

The scientists behind the FuturICT project intend these facilities, along with other project activities, to help trigger a profound advance in our ability to craft policy options and contingency plans on a scientific basis, and thereby to forge intelligent responses to emerging challenges and risks. Other research streams proposed within the project to support this goal include 1) initiatives to gather and organise data on social, economic, technological and environmental processes on an unprecedented scale, harnessing the flood of data now coming from the world wide web as well as distributed sensor networks; 2) efforts to develop institutional designs for a flexible, adaptive, and resource-efficient real-time management of complex socio-economic systems and organisations, and 3) efforts to develop designs for smarter cities, transport, traffic and logistic systems, and intelligent energy production and consumption systems.

In a broad sense, the Flagship project aims to develop a novel, data-driven computational social science enabling the comprehensive, real-time description of the techno-socio-economic dynamics on both local and global scales. In addition, FuturICT aims to make the global ICT system more socially interactive by allowing it to adapt to social needs, to react to unforeseen events and in general to increase the systemic resilience of our societies. For example, the system will be able to shuffle resources (e.g., information sources, bandwidth and distributed computing resources) to enable better monitoring and management of an emerging crisis situation. It will also provide emergency ‘slow down and ask a real human being’ mechanisms, preventing automation from accelerating a crisis towards the point of systemic failure.

The knowledge generated by the FUTURICT project and its science-based tools for policy planning will benefit everyone. Decision-makers in government and industry will gain powerful tools to explore the consequences of decisions in a complex world, and to help them make decisions on the basis of sound knowledge. Our societies will benefit from policies supporting a more sustainable future.

Mission: Managing Complexity
As described in the initial proposal (this is a five-page summary), the FuturICT project aims to trigger a scientific paradigm shift by bringing together the currently fragmented fields of ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences to create a beneficial co-evolution of social systems and information technology. It proposes activities aiming to develop a new generation of cooperative, self-organised ICT systems, which will stimulate the emergence of a data-centric scientific foundation for the understanding and management of global techno-socio-economic systems (i.e. human socio-economic systems in interaction with information technology). The overall project concept is illustrated diagrammatically in figure below (from the proposal), which shows the role of ICT at its core.



In effect, the FuturICT project intends to exploit current and future global ICT infrastructure to create a ‘planetary nervous system’ able to provide real-time information on important events, social processes and structures, always with a strong focus on preserving individual privacy. It will, for example, collect data from a multitude of heterogeneous sources ranging from crowd-sourced sensor information through digital media and social networks, and use this data to identify shifts or trends in collective opinions and social attitudes, changes in consumer behaviour, the emergence of tensions in communities, migrations and so on. This planetary nervous system will facilitate social awareness and lead to the construction of the Living Earth Platform (described above), the technology feeding upward (to decision makers) and outward (to the public) to facilitate both scientifically based and transparent crisis management.

FuturICT also aims to develop a deeper complex systems science of ICT-society co-evolutionary dynamics. This new science will include models, theories and tools for the analysis of complex interactions between society and socially adaptive ICT. It will also lead to novel methods enhancing trust, stability and reliability in self-organised ICT infrastructures through the application of socially-inspired mechanisms for cooperation, coordination and reputation propagation.

The FuturICT project aims to foster the scientific and ICT advances needed to address the most pressing challenges -- financial and economic, social, environmental -- for humanity in the 21st century. Creating realistic global-scale simulations requires accurate techno-socio-economic models and, hence, fundamental breakthroughs in the social sciences and economics will follow as a natural outcome of the FuturICT Flagship.

Early Progress
The FuturICT Flagship project has already gathered and organized a core of the scientific communities needed for its ambitious undertaking, including leading ICT experts (particularly experts in reality mining, semantic technologies and visual analytics, national supercomputer and data centres in Switzerland, Germany and Spain, the pervasive adaption community, and experts in distributed ICT systems), the Social Simulation and Complexity Science communities. In addition, a number of related institutions and organisations have shown strong interest in engaging with the project. These include the Institute of New Economic Thinking and groups from areas such as sustainability science, interdisciplinary physics and traffic experts. The FuturICT Flagship project is supported by hundreds of scientists all over Europe and beyond (letters of support are available on the FuturICT website).

Effects on European Competitiveness
Scientists behind the FuturICT Flagship argue that it will have a wide range of positive impacts in Europe’s competitiveness. The project proposal describes these as follows:

For Industry:
European industrial strength increasingly revolves around ICT services and depends crucially on skills for managing complexity (in networks and in individual ICT systems) and for engineering system reliability and trustworthiness. This is especially true for the automotive and aerospace industries, which invest more effort in developing reliable ICT than any other industry. The research and development envisioned in FuturICT couold significantly boost the competitiveness of European industry by identifying new technologies for increasing the resilience of large-scale ICT systems.

For Society:
FuturICT will provide tools allowing humanity to cope with the major challenges of today and tomorrow, for which current science and policy making tools are inadequate. In particular, it will improve our ability to obtain early information about impending crises and to take intelligent actions to avoid them or mitigate thor consequences.

For Governance:
FuturICT aims to create centres for social modelling and prediction, located in Europe’s main capital cities and linked through high-speed data flows, which should improve the capacity of European authorities to make coordinated decisions based on collective knowledge, even in rapidly changing situations. The project also aims to bring the power of ICT modellingto people outside a closed circle of mathematical and theoretical practitioners, thereby widening citizen engagement with the policy makng process.

The figure below illustrates the likely outcomes of the FuturICT Flagship project for technology, science and society.



Project Centres
The main hubs for the FuturICT project will be formed in the Greater London Area (around UCL, involving Imperial College, London School of Economics, and Oxford University) and in the Zurich area (around ETH Zurich), with further regional research, innovation and technological hubs, connecting clusters of scientific and technological excellence under a common strategic and visionary goal. By providing a pool of funds for collaborative research, FuturICT will encourage researchers, business and government to work together in the specified scientific and technological areas.

Coordination Action Objectives
FuturICT is currently funded by the European Commission for one year (beginning in May 2011) as a pilot project Coordination Action. The main objective of the proposed Coordination Action is to design, consolidate and fully describe our plans for the FuturICT Flagship. During the Coordination Action period this will be achieved through the elaboration and assessment of the vision and research agenda, integration of the research community and development of a shared identity, securing stakeholder commitment, identyifying resources and developing an operational framework.

Work Packages will require insight from researchers in ICT, the social sciences, and complex systems theory. Thus ICT, social science and complexity theory run through every Work Package and are not split into separate Work Packages. Proposed coordination activities will serve to bring these communities together. Across all Work Packages, the majority of meetings will take place in London or Zurich, which both have good accessibility.

WP1: Co-evolutionn of ICT and Society
Lead organiser Paul Lucowicz

This Work Package will be concerned with developing the detailed concept of the ICT vision behind the FuturICT Flagship proposal. As described in the proposal overview, the FuturICT project aims to achieve a paradigm shift towards social awareness, participatory, globally self-organised systems that co-evolve with human society. This new generation of systems will turn the ubiquitous, globally networked system that is already a reality today into a ‘virtual nervous system of human society’, blending ICT with social structures and processes in a symbiotic relationship. This will provide the basis for the novel data driven computational social science (WP2) and facilitate planetary-scale real-time observation and modelling of social processes (via the Living Earth Simulation, Visualisation, and Participation Platform; in short, the Living Earth Platform), empower novel ways of individual participation in political and economic life, and enable ICT systems to autonomously mediate social interaction and help mitigate global crises.

WP2: Interconnected Observatories of Society for a Resilient and Sustainable Future
Lead organiser Rosaria Conte

This Work Package will detail a vision for the design of crisis observatories, decision arenas and participatory platforms. We envisage that these facilities would be applied across a range of demonstrator areas. The most suitable demonstrator areas will be selected within this Work Package. This Work Package will also consider creating a big library for agent-based, multi-level and other simulation approaches (referred to as the ‘World of Modelling’), which will be utilised by researchers in all demonstrator areas. The different parts of the scientific roadmap will be elaborated by specific small teams (task forces) of specialist researchers that will consult a large variety of experts on the fields related to their tasks. The task forces will dedicate part of their effort to exploring transversal aspects, making a direct link with the vision developed in WP1. The task forces will also determine financial needs and resources corresponding to their areas of investigation. National Integration Meetings will be arranged and ‘Hilbert workshops' held to define challenges.

WP3: Designing an Innovation Accelerator
Lead organiser Dirk Helbing

This Work Package will develop an Innovation Accelerator, building on the state of the art worked out in the EU VISIONEER project. Meetings will be organised to bring together members of the ICT, social science and complexity science communities in order to identify the fundamental scientific as well as the practical key challenges in creating the above described Innovation Accelerator, in particular the ones related to managing very large collaborative research projects of the special multi-disciplinary kind and the hub-and-spoke structure proposed here. Furthermore, this work package will specify the needed methods, tools and institutional designs to address these challenges and more generally provide novel, more appropriate approaches for the management, reporting, publication, and evaluation of scientific progress than those used today and over the past decades.

WP4: Management
Lead organiser Steven Bishop

This Work Package will focus on managing the people, the finances and other resources related to FuturICT. A large part of the coordination responsibilities will include compilation of the final proposal for Flagship funding leading to the continuance of the research paths. A Management Committee will be formed to provide effective coordination, administration and financial management of the FuturICT Coordination Action and a Steering Committee set up to coordinate the tasks. While the Work Packages establish a formal structure, the partners also recognise that it is important to capitalise on a wealth and breadth of loose, informal activities furthering this project. The management ethos is to embrace these apparently minor inputs, without losing sight of the common goal by allowing the Work Package leaders some flexibility in managing their funds to facilitate these important interactions. This said, to maintain focus, most meetings during the Coordination Action period will take place at the hubs in London and Zurich. A Science Board will be arranged to provide detailed scientific inputs from active collaborators and researchers in specialised fields. A Scientific Advisory Board will be set up consisting of senior figures from academia and beyond to advise on broad issues related to the Flagship concepts.

Open Call Funds The distribution of resources is a key mechanism to guarantee the openness of the FuturICT Flagship. A share of the overall budget will be placed in the commonly governed Open Call Fund. The fund will open to Partners and non-partners. A simple ‘Open Call for Ideas’ will be arranged to cover activities unanticipated at the proposal stage or responding to special opportunities.

WP5: Flagship Infrastructure
Lead organiser Felix Reed-Tsochas

This Work Package will focus on coordinating the development of the framework required for the effective implementation of the FuturICT Flagship. Consultation meetings will be held to define the Flagship framework, to identify required resources, and to determine feasibility and logistics for accessing such resources. Activities will be organised to collect best practice from other larger organisational structures, such as the EIT ICT Labs KIC and the Climate-KIC, but also from large-scale science projects such as the ATLAS experiment at CERN and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). These meetings will vary from face-to-face consultations, group activities and collaborations with these various institutes. The first two FuturICT hubs will be created in London and Zurich. In London, UCL, Imperial and LSE will join forces to form a London Technology Innovation Centre.

WP6: Dissemination and Stakeholder Liaison
Lead organiser JB McCarthy

This Work Package will ensure that the Coordination Action and the underlying Flagship vision and concept attain high visibility with all relevant stakeholders, and aims at securing their commitment and support to the ten year Flagship project. FuturICT has already attracted the interest of the media in different forms and many different languages. The interest for this project will surely increase, and this Work Package will support this growth by establishing a strong media presence. The project has already used an SME (The Motion Box) to create a trailer, and further work will be planned to highlight the Flagship concept as well as the specific FuturICT project. An Action Plan will be created for dissemination to FuturICT collaborators and beyond. This Action Plan will consist of key information, pivotal activities, and actions for the coming months, all in a simple and easy to read document. This Action Plan will be produced at months 3, 6 and 9, ensuring total public engagements with the project.

Supporting Institutions
More than 200 academic institutes, research centres and scientific organizations have pledged their support for the FuturICT project. In total, more than 500 individuals and organizations support the initiative.

National FuturICT Web Sites
Progress is being made in some countries in coordinating national efforts towards launching the FuturICT project.

Spain Italy Poland