Simon Buckingham Shum presented FuturICT’s “Global Participatory Platform” to the FET Flagship organizers in November, Warsaw, at a meeting for all six pilot projects to report on progress.
As reported in an earlier story (Sept 21, 2011), KMi is playing an active role in FuturICT, one of the EC’s FET Flagship pilots, funded to define a ground-breaking 10 year project. FuturICT (www.futurict.eu) is a visionary project that will deliver new science and technology to allow us to explore, understand and manage our connected world. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying our complex, global, socially interactive systems probably constitutes the most pressing scientific challenge of the 21st Century. Integrating complexity science with information and communication technologies (ICT) and the social sciences, will allow us to design novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive technologies based on socially inspired paradigms. Data from a variety of sources will help us to develop models of techno-socio-economic systems. In turn, insights from these models will inspire a new generation of socially adaptive, self-organized ICT systems, which will support the building of societal-level collective intelligence.
KMI is part of this FET Flagship Pilot project, rated top of the six shortlisted to submit a full proposal for a 10 year 1billion project. KMI’s involvement is led by Simon Buckingham Shum with his work on web-based argumentation, collective intelligence and learning analytics, with John Domingue adding expertise in the brokering of semantic web services to orchestrate distributed data and services.
FuturICT was recently the cover story in Scientific American, which has generated significant media interest in the project. In contrast to the SciAm story, however, FuturICT is not seeking to pool all the world’s data in a centralised paradigm, but to leverage the power of the open, social, participatory, connected web of people and data, the Global Participatory Platform being one of the foundational elements of the concept.
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