Challenges in Complex Systems Science

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.

References in corpus (11)

• Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles
• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Synchronization in complex networks
• The Dynamics of Crowd Disasters: An Empirical Study
• Understanding the spreading patterns of mobile phone viruses
• Homophily, Cultural Drift and the Co-Evolution of Cultural Groups
• Generic Absorbing Transition in Coevolution Dynamics
• A system of mobile agents to model social networks
• Robustness of Trans-European Gas Networks
• The Future of Social Experimenting
• Threshold learning dynamics in social networks

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Structure and dynamics of molecular networks: A novel paradigm of drug discovery. A comprehensive review
• A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness
• Demographic noise and resilience in a semi-arid ecosystem model
• The FuturICT Education Accelerator
• Solving Optimization Problems by the Public Goods Game
• Ranking the Economic Importance of Countries and Industries
• Wealth distribution across communities of adaptive financial agents
• Complexity Aided Design: the FuturICT Technological Innovation Paradigm