Large scale experiments and simulations for the second generation of FuturICT – FutureICT2.0

FuturICT 2.0 will revamp and enlarge the community of social, computational and complexity scientists created by the FuturICT CSA (www.futurICT.eu) and pave the ground for a novel science of society, exploring the hidden mechanisms and foundational processes underlying societies. The pilot was meant to show how data-driven anticipation of challenges permits the scientific communities to identify new strategic research directions, and different stakeholders to feed a collective pool of knowledge about management strategies. FuturICT 2.0 aims to make a step ahead on the trajectory of FuturICT, featuring a platform for large-scale simulation and experiments.
The FuturICT 2.0 consortium consists of partners with different expertise. All partners have long-standing experience with national and European collaborative research projects. Most of them have participated in the FuturICT FET Flagship Pilot project and have experience on how to coordinate and manage large initiatives at the European scale and beyond.
The project includes three main activities: research & innovation, networking and dissemination. As the range of activities is quite broad and diversified, the organizational structure is based on a nested hierarchy of overarching objectives and tasks. All the partners, though with a different degree of responsibility (also depending on the funds available in the respective countries), will continuously be involved in the three activities running partially in parallel.
The FuturICT 2.0 initiative will set the stage for a large-scale worldwide research project to foster the scientific breakthroughs and the technological advances necessary to address the societal challenges that humanity is facing in the 21st century. The need for such an integrated approach has only increased since the FuturICT1.0 attempt; nearly all of the challenges envisaged five years ago - from financial, economic and social instability to crime and conflict – have remained unsolved in front of the European Union and the world. To put forward this initiative equals to re-igniting a unique attempt to let everyone know, understand, and decide about the social processes that involve us all.