What is GIACS?

GIACS (General Integration of the Applications of Complexity in Science) was created to coordinate the activities of the Complexity Pathfinder in NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology).

NEST is a new activity in the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) funded by European Commission. It aims to support unconventional and visionary research with the potential to open new fields for European science and technology, as well as research on potential problems uncovered by science.

Our goals

The objective of GIACS is to support the integration of NEST Complexity Pathfinder STREPs. These Specific Targeted Research Projects deal with implementing complexity science in various application domains including physical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology; social sciences such as psychology, sociology, political science, economics.

GIACS is a platform for connecting people from various complexity application areas, helping them contact the appropriate STREPs. We aim to establish the channels for coordinating the STREPs and for causing them to self-organize.

We stage events and the places where scientists from different STREPs can meet, teach one another, learn form one another, and grow together a new generation of interdisciplinary young researchers.

Our aim is to insure that the wider community will not ignore complexity STREPs and their applicative potential. We wish to make to the citizens and decision makers the presence of the Complexity STREP ideas and objectives as obvious as the existence of atoms, galaxies and electricity.

We will build and put in the service of the complexity STREPs the following instruments:

1. Instruments for the collective steering and self-definition of the Pathfinder.
2. Instruments to support the common recruiting and rising of the young researchers for the STREPs.
3. Instruments to discover, connect and transfer information / data to communities of potential users and consumers of the methods, ideas and results of the STREPs.
4. Instruments to find, catalogue, rank and present in a coherent way to researchers and students of the STREPs relevant data and knowledge produced originally within other disciplines
5. Instruments to define and represent the Complexity STREP community at the European level.
6. Instruments to initiate and coordinate interdisciplinary research transferring and applying the STREPs research.

Find out more:

5th European Conference on Complex Systems in Jerusalem 2008 http://www.giacs.org/eccs5

Firms and Networks - call for papers http://www.giacs.org/FN

EU-China Summer School on "Internet, Sciences, and Society" http://www.giacs.org/warsaw2008