Abstract
FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems route to Social Sciences. This include complex systems having: many heterogeneous interacting parts; multiple scales; complicated transition laws; unexpected or unpredicted emergence; sensitive dependence on initial conditions; path-dependent dynamics; networked hierarchical connectivities; interaction of autonomous agents; self-organisation; non-equilibrium dynamics; combinatorial explosion; adaptivity to changing environments; co-evolving subsystems; ill-defined boundaries; and multilevel dynamics. In this context, science is seen as the process of abstracting the dynamics of systems from data. This presents many challenges including: data gathering by large-scale experiment, participatory sensing and social computation, managing huge distributed dynamic and heterogeneous databases; moving from data to dynamical models, going beyond correlations to cause-effect relationships, understanding the relationship between simple and comprehensive models with appropriate choices of variables, ensemble modeling and data assimilation, modeling systems of systems of systems with many levels between micro and macro; and formulating new approaches to prediction, forecasting, and risk, especially in systems that can reflect on and change their behaviour in response to predictions, and systems whose apparently predictable behaviour is disrupted by apparently unpredictable rare or extreme events. These challenges are part of the FuturICT agenda.
Highlights
Simplicity and sparsity of scientific description have always been regarded as a theoretical virtue
Knowledge aggregated from complex self-organizing human or natural systems opens up the challenge of the implementation of unconventional computational principles based on complex dynamical systems [61], such as reservoir computing [62,63] or information processing based on complex systems dynamics [64]
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has radically and unforeseeably changed society as a whole. This is true in highly industrialized countries as shown for example by the large impact and penetration of mobile phone networks in developing countries in Africa. These changes can be attributed to the actions of individuals and the availability of new channels of communication that transform basic social processes: (i) face-to-face encounters have become less critical than in the past, (ii) the dynamics of building and strengthening relationships have evolved by taking advantage of ICT, and (iii) new ICT-mediated groups and communities have emerged, by overcoming typical limitations such as distance or lack of a common platform
Summary
Simplicity and sparsity of scientific description have always been regarded as a theoretical virtue. A living being cannot be described in terms of a few variables, a human being cannot be separated from the rest of society without altering its nature fundamentally, and the functionality of our brain emerges from the network of interacting neurons These are examples of what nowadays are called complex systems. A growing body of knowledge is being accumulated about these complex systems, a large number of groups are striving for a deeper understanding of their common features and an ever richer set of concepts and tools are being devised to tackle them These developments are gradually leading up to what we believe is becoming a coherent and fundamental science of complexity [2, 3]. FuturICT is devoted to the analysis and modeling of these complex and interwoven processes
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