FuturICT is one of six candidates for a so-called Flagship Initiative, drawn from a field of 21 proposals, which has received one year's funding from the European Commission on 1 May 2011 to draw up a full proposal which will be submitted to the Commission on 2012. This initial funding, amounting to a total of €1,520,000 for all six partner institutions (including Oxford), is not meant to support research but rather allows a highly detailed and comprehensive proposal to be submitted to the Commission after a year. On this basis the Commission will then in all likelihood nominate two full Flagship proposals, with funding of €500m each over 10 years (i.e. a total of €1,000m over 10 years). At this stage FuturICT is a candidate for funding as a Flagship Programme, and since it was the highest ranked of the six proposals that made it past the first hurdle prospects may indeed be good, but it has not at this stage been awarded funding for 10 years (which would in any case be €500m for each of the two funded projects). We should know which projects have been funded in late 2012 or early 2013. Oxford participation time from 1st May 2011 till 30th April 2012.
Participant organisation name:
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies
The FuturICT flagship proposal intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe in a 10 year 1 billion EUR program to explore social life on earth and everything it relates to. The FuturICT flagship proposal will produce historic breakthroughs and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict, including the financial crisis. Here is the official ranking and description of all EU flagship pilots, and here you can find out more about FuturICT.
The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems.
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. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies probably constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century and is equally important for the development of novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive information and communication technologies (ICT), based on socially inspired paradigms.
We think that integrating ICT, Complexity Science and the Social Sciences will create a paradigm shift, facilitating a symbiotic co-evolution of ICT and society. Data from our complex globe-spanning ICT system will be leveraged 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.
Further information
FuturICT