Professor Dr Dirk Helbing heads the ETH Zurich Competence Center "Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems" and the "Physics of Socio-Economic Systems" Division of the German Physical Society. he is the Scientific co-ordinator of the Future ICT Project, a multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with a 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.

About the Living Earth Simulator

ExtremeTech.com: "Described as a “knowledge collider,” and now with a pledge of one billion euros from the European Union, the Living Earth Simulator is a new big data and supercomputing project that will attempt to uncover the underlying sociological and psychological laws that underpin human civilization. In the same way that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider smashes together protons to see what happens, the Living Earth Simulator (LES) will gather knowledge from a Planetary Nervous System (PNS — yes, really) to try to predict societal fluctuations such as political unrest, economic bubbles, disease epidemics, and so on..."

Living Earth Simulator: The Ultimate HPC Big Data Application - HPC Wire

Earth project aims to 'simulate everything' - Article at the BBC