The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator – Exploring and Managing our Future
This is the web site of FuturICT Switzerland. Please also see www.futurict.eu for the web site of the European FuturICT Flagship Proposal.
Science Case
The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator wants science to catch up with the speed at which new problems are arising in our changing world as a consequence of globalization, technological, demographic and environmental change.
The ultimate goal of the project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems. FuturICT will create the scientific methods and ICT platforms needed to address planetary-scale challenges and opportunities in the 21st century and thus contribute to make our societies more adaptive, resilient and sustainable.
FuturICT as a whole will act as a Knowledge Accelerator, turning massive data into knowledge and technological progress. Specifically, FuturICT will build a sophisticated simulation, visualization and participation platform, called the Living Earth Platform. This platform will power Interactive Observatories, to detect and mitigate crises, and Participatory Platforms, to support the decision-making of policy-makers, business people and citizens, and to facilitate a better social, economic and political participation.
Basically, FuturICT will integrate three scientific disciplines: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Complexity Science and the Social Sciences. This new approach will facilitate the co-evolution of ICT systems and society in a symbiotic way. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying socially interactive systems is also a precondition for the development of novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive ICT. In turn, data from existing and future globe-spanning ICT systems will be leveraged to develop new models of techno-socio-economic systems and thus allows a better management of crises and challenges in several fields – finance, health, environment, natural resources, migration, transport, etc.
Benefits
Benefit for Swiss science and society
FuturICT enables scientific and intellectual leadership in the area of techno-socio-economic modelling and simulation, innovative ICT services, and sustainability science for Switzerland and Europe. The project builds on existing research priorities of ETH Zurich and Switzerland, and it strengthens and secures the Swiss position of Switzerland as one of the top players in Science.
Benefits for Swiss science
The development of the scientific vision of the FuturICT project has been led by ETH Zurich and supported by leading scientists from all over the world. It is planned to craft key components of the main deliverable, the Living Earth Platform, in Switzerland. FuturICT is very much committed to the integration of diverse knowledge from different disciplines.
It has formed a multi-disciplinary network spanning the majority of European countries and maintains links to leading institutions in the United States (such as MIT, Harvard University and the Santa Fe Institute) as well as South America and Asia (e.g. Japan, China, Singapore and Hong Kong). The FuturICT network and infrastructure will offer scientific talents attractive career perspectives in Switzerland and in a variety of disciplines.
FuturICT fits ETH Zurich and Swiss research priorities. Switzerland is a leading country in ICT research for years already with a long tradition in international studies and peace keeping. There is a close link with the newly created Risk Center at ETH Zurich, and many synergies exist namely with the NCCR Finrisk, NCCR Democracy, NCCR Affective Sciences and several programmes in the field of climate research.
Benefits for Swiss society and politics
New methods and tools developed by FuturICT have a direct impact on the anticipation or mitigation of upcoming crises and allow decision makers to explore likely feedback, side, and cascading effects of possible choices, and to pursue new approaches in the fields of international crisis prevention and integrated risk management. A better understanding of the cascading effects in a financial crisis, for instance, could reduce the impact of the crisis and save important public expenditure every year.
The administration and governance as such, and more specifically the health sector, and education can enormously profit from the FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator. Finally, the project will also address questions such as how to design more sustainable cities and smarter energy systems, and how to create techno-socio-economic systems that are more resilient to shocks.
Benefits for the Swiss economy
The FuturICT project offers new business opportunities through its participatory and recommender platforms, tools to explore possible future developments, and to mine massive data. This can be turned into competitive advantages for the banking and insurance industry as well as data-oriented businesses and the IT sector itself – all these are important sectors of the Swiss economy. The development of innovative social ICT will also facilitate the creation of new enterprises. The breath-taking economic potential of social ICT is probably best illustrated by the recent increase in the value of the social networking companies.
Financing scheme
Investment costs are primarily planned to cover high-end ICT developments and dataset access fees, as both are crucial for the flagship project. Running costs are mostly for personnel, in particular for researchers on all levels and student assistants.
ICT developments include: building and developing an experimental data center; extending a GPU multi-core cluster for massively parallel high-throughput simulations; building an interactive visualization dome in the cupola of ETH Zurich’s main building for the Interactive Observatories; adding parallel computing nodes for massive data mining and large-scale simulations of the Living Earth Simulator.
Data access rights involving massive datasets are required for the Financial, Socio-Economic, Conflict as well as Transport and Logistics Observatories, and for commercial citation and patent data.
Costs for personnel include salaries and fellowships of yearly 60-65 PhD students and 45-50 postdocs as well as 10 senior staff in Switzerland.