Positive Feedback from External Reviewers

We are delighted with the positive feedback on our Pilot Phase Project that we have received from the EC FP7 External Reviewers. They have given us lots of constructive feedback that we can build on within our full project proposal that we will submit in October. Their comments (below) on the potential impacts of the FuturICT project is very encouraging, we look forward to making this a reality.

"There is evidence that the project will have considerable scientific, technical, commercial, social or environmental impact. If the planned flagship project would be successful, there could be many scientific and technological breakthroughs including the Living Earth Simulator, the Planetary Nervous System, the Global Participatory Platform, approaches to socio-inspired ICT and global system science, several exploratories and observatories as well as guidelines for an ethical use of ICT."

Living Earth Simulator (LES)

The Living Earth Simulator (LES) is the FuturICT vision for how we will simulate or model complex events or scenarios. To date researchers have made great adavnces in many domain specific areas (eg Transportation, Energy, Smart Cities etc) but FuturICT wants to move this process to a new level by allowing for several domain level initiatives to share data and models. We have started using the term Exploratory as a collective term for this more advanced and comprehensive grouping. These additional data points, more complex models and much longer term view of crisis, disaster or policy and regulatory impacts on society and business help us understand interactions within our ecosystem. One of the hallmarks of the LES will be its open architecture that will allow different models and data sources to be incorporated.

The large majority of Open Data and Big Data projects that have been deployed in commercial projects are looking at historical data or at best real time data supporting a service such as parking availability, public transport schedules. FuturICT has a much longer term focus on the issues affecting society and businesses. While real time data and historical data will be used to help inform the models, the key will be to simulate our ecosystem and develop a range of possible scenarios that might emerge. We are conscious that for most foresight challenges, the answer is not a simple binary yes/no type answer. The LES will help develop the multi-disciplinary sciences supporting this area so that data sources can be private or public, Open Data or proprietary/paid for data sources, aggregated or detailed. The compute layer can be private, public, research, paid for service. The models could be open source or private or a mixture and so on. Our society and business models are many and varied, we are unsure of the impact of regulatory and policy mandates so we need to allow for any eventuality. The FuturICT technology will be built to allow for change, flexibity and choice as that is what people expect.

Planetary Nervous System (PNS)

The digital shadow left behind by business transactions and individuals during their daily routines are increasing at a tremendous rate. This flood of digital data includes phone records, internet access, electronic billing systems, web sites, social media, videos, podcasts and many more sources. The Internet of Things initiative has stimulated a vision of the very near future where many more devices are planned to be embedded in cars, electronic devices, healthcare equipment, sports equipment etc. Open Data initiatives are underway in most of the advanced economies with the plan to open up more local and central government resources to the public. These data sources include static data that is published monthly or quarterly for example as well as real-time data such as traffic flows, parking space allocation, public transport schedules. These are the types of data that are proliferating rapidly across the face of the planet and providing the very fabric on which local and national governments manage their operations, policy makers plan for the future, regulators review for compliance/model new approaches etc.

What is not clear to most of us is where is all this data, when is it available, what is the data model, how do I get access, is it aggregated or very detailed, what topics does it cover?......The promise of a world of Open Data and easy access to other data sources is great but if it is just making the data accessible and nothing more then it will be extremely difficult to make use of it. This gap is real both for researchers who dont know about other sources of data or even how to get access to it if it is available as well as for businesses and citizens who might not have a fraction of the resources required to access and make productive use of data sources.

One of the initiatives that FuturICT will promote is for a Data Commons within the Flagship as well as to other research projects initially. We will need to develop a Data Catalogue that will help accelerate access to and interoperability between these data sources if we want to realise a world where we can make use of the potential insights stored in these databases. If we want to make use of this digital shadow then we must think digitally as to how we can re-use and integrate data sources. This industrial scale approach to democratising access to data will help all sections of society and allow us to release the potential value trapped within.

For more on this topic please refer to this short overview on the FuturICT web site FuturICT Planetary Nervous System overview