Prof. Helbing about challenges and perspectives of the FuturICT
Prof. Helbing about challenges and perspectives of the FuturICT
Today we know more about the universe than about our society. It's time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future.
In collaboration with the New England ETH Alumni board, swissnex Boston hosted a VIP aperitif for local ETH Alumni followed by a fascinating lecture about the future of modern information technology with Prof. Helbing.
Prof. Helbing gave insights into the FuturICT flagship project, which is a response to the European Flagship call. FuturICT is the only flagship pilot directly addressing techno-socio-economic challenges of the future. It competes with a project on new materials for future computer chips, a project on low-energy sensors, a project that likes to build a human brain in silicio, a project on individualized medicine, and a project on robots to support humans.
The audience received a compelling overview about FuturICT: FuturICT as a whole will act as a Knowledge Accelerator, studying the principles that keep our social system together and turning massive data into knowledge and technological progress. In this way, FuturICT will create the scientific methods and ICT platforms needed to address planetary-scale challenges and opportunities in the 21st century. Specifically, FuturICT will build a sophisticated simulation, visualization and participation platform, called the Living Earth Platform. This platform will power Crisis Observatories, to detect and mitigate crises, and Participatory Platforms, to support the decision-making of policy-makers, managers, and citizens.
Prof. Helbing summarized: “The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator wants to get science to catch up with the speed at which our world is changing in face of globalization, technological, demographic and environmental change, and make a contribution to strengthening our societies' adaptiveness, resilience, and sustainability. It will do so by combining the best established scientific methods with multi-scale computer modeling, social supercomputing, large-scale data mining and participatory platforms (including web experiments and populated virtual worlds).”
For those who missed it, please find here his slides!
Further Reading:
http://www.futurict.ethz.ch/FurtherInformation, for example,
“Pluralistic Modeling of Complex Systems”
