FuturICT Journal Publications

S. Cincotti, D. Sornette, P. Treleaven, S. Battiston, G. Caldarelli, C. Hommes, A. Kirman

This paper describes the vision of a European Exploratory for economics and finance using an interdisciplinary consortium of economists, natural scientists, computer scientists and engineers, who will combine their expertise to address the enormous challenges of the 21st century. This Academic Public facility is intended for economic modelling, investigating all aspects of risk and stability, improving financial technology, and evaluating proposed regulatory and taxation changes. The European Exploratory for economics and finance will be constituted as a network of infrastructure, observatories, data repositories, services and facilities and will foster the creation of a new cross-disciplinary research community of social scientists, complexity scientists and computing (ICT) scientists to collaborate in investigating major issues in economics and finance. It is also considered a cradle for training and collaboration with the private sector to spur spin-offs and job creations in Europe in the finance and economic sectors. The Exploratory will allow Social Scientists and Regulators as well as Policy Makers and the private sector to conduct realistic investigations with real economic, financial and social data. The Exploratory will (i) continuously monitor and evaluate the status of the economies of countries in their various components, (ii) use, extend and develop a large variety of methods including data mining, process mining, computational and artificial intelligence and every other computer and complex science techniques coupled with economic theory and econometric, and (iii) provide the framework and infrastructure to perform what-if analysis, scenario evaluations and computational, laboratory, field and web experiments to inform decision makers and help develop innovative policy, market and regulation designs.

The FuturICT project is a response to the European Flagship Call in the Area of Future and Emerging Technologies, which is planning to spend 1 billion EUR on each of two flagship projects over a period of 10 years.

FuturICT seeks to create an open, global but decentralized, democratically controlled information platform that will use online data and real-time measurements together with novel theoretical models and experimental methods to achieve a paradigm shift in our understanding of today’s strongly interdependent and complex world and make our techno-socio-economic systems more flexible, adaptive, resilient, sustainable, and livable through a participatory approach.

by Dirk Helbing

 

One important question for science and society is how to best promote scientific progress. Inspired by the great success of Hilbert’s famous set of problems, the FuturICT project tries to stimulate and focus the efforts of many scientists by formulating Grand Challenges, i.e. a set of fundamental, relevant and hardly solvable scientific questions.