News Story

KMi helping to shape FuturICT EU Flagship

John Domingue, Wednesday 21 Sep 2011

More than 300 scientists from around Europe are responding to the EU FET Flagship call for a ground-breaking 10 year project. The ultimate goal of the FuturICT flagship project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience. FET Flagships are ambitious large-scale, science-driven, research initiatives that aim to achieve a visionary goal. The scientific advance should provide a strong and broad basis for future technological innovation and economic exploitation in a variety of areas, as well as novel benefits for society. FuturICT was ranked top of a shortlist of six submissions, who now have a year’s funding to build the consortium and develop the detailed proposal. The vision is of integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences to develop models of techno-socio-economic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inform the development of a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organized ICT systems. KMi’s involvement, led by Simon Buckingham Shum, working with Prof Jeff Johnson in Maths, Computing & Technology Faculty, focuses on the applications to Education, and the concept of a Global Participatory Platform which opens up participation to diverse stakeholders in society. How can the power of large datasets, modelling, simulation and visualization tools, and the debates about their significance for society, become a public good, rather than the preserve of an elite?