News Story

FuturICT FET Flagship: open access special issue

KMi Reporter, Tuesday 11 Dec 2012

KMi is part of the FuturICT FET Flagship project submission, to develop a science of global, socially interactive systems. An open access journal special issue marks the scientific agenda that this 10 year project has mapped out…

The European FET Flagships competition has the following mission:

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.

KMi’s John Domingue and myself, together with Design Faculty’s Jeff Johnson, are part of the FuturICT project, which recently submitted its proposal for the first 30months of a 10 year research programme (PDF).

FuturlCT is a FET Flagship project using collective, participatory research, integrated across the fields of ICT, the social sciences and complexity science, to design socio-âinspired technology and develop a science of global, socially interactive systems. The project will bring together, on a global level, Big Data, new modelling techniques and new forms of interaction, leading to a new understanding of society and its co-â evolution with technology. It will place Europe at the forefront of a major scientific drive to understand, explore and manage our complex, connected world in a more sustainable and resilient manner.

Today sees the publication of an open access special issue to accompany the proposal. Within the special issue, you’ll find a fascinating set of contributions from European scientists who set out a 10 year research agenda within their fields: what are the really tough problems? There are also visionary position papers outlining the kind of socio-technical infrastructure that FuturICT will investigate, and a foregrounding of the ethical dimensions that human Big Data and Analytics always raise.