WP # 1: Connection to government, business and media leaders
WP1 proposes the organization of STREPs meeting with government, business and media leaders such as to make those branches aware and interested in what the STREPs have to offer. The objective is to bring ultimately to real projects and business applications some of the STREPs research results. We want to establish continuing contact of STREPs to senior policy makers, senior industry managers and senior media persons across the continent. Our goal is to satisfy interest in the STREP aspects pertaining to strategic risks assessment, procurement and distribution networks, social ills eradication. Public interest might be expected and we aim at coverages of STREPs’ research by major media that help reach a wider range of actors from more diverse communities.
Leading institution:
TUD - TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAET DRESDEN - DRESDEN, GERMANY
WP leader
Prof. Dirk Helbing helbing@traficforum.org
Objectives
As promising as the recent discoveries regarding the functioning, adaptiveness and robustness of complex physical, biological, and socio-economic systems may be---their potential has not yet been broadly ecognized in business, industry, public organizations, administrations, and governments. This is mostly because these findings have not yet entered curricula of standard study directions and due to the scarcity of real-world applications, at least published ones. This work package aims at increasing the awareness for the relevance of the scientific output of the complexity community and the STREPs, in subjects such as:
- the relevance of information flows for social cooperation,
- the prediction and control of systems with non-linear interactions, delays, and imperfect information,
- counter-intuitive effects of management strategies,
- the interaction of boundedly rational agents,
- disaster, crisis and risk management,
- transport networks and urban evolution,
- the stability of supply systems etc.
Instruments:
- Workshop on Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments and Media with a series of distinguished lectures.
- The related financial reports, conference materials
- Prize for Applied Research in Complexity
- The international workshop on Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments and Media aims at bringing together leading scientists and STREP members with business people, decision-makers in public organizations, administrations, or governments, and young researchers.
- The workshop is internationally announced together with a Call for Papers and Poster Contributions, which compete for the Research Prize. The Prize for Applied Research in Complexity Science serves to stimulate the participation of the leading experts and to motivate high standards of the poster presentations.
- The workshop is a 3 day event. The first and the second day of the workshop are reserved for the invited speakers, which can probably afford to stay a maximum of two days. The third day is for contributed talks of 20-30 minutes plus 10 minutes of discussion. The first day will start with a short introduction of every invited speaker, including the fields represented by them. This is to maximize interactions between and with the invited speakers from the very beginning. For similar reasons, parallel sessions will be avoided, while a poster session serves to cover the width of the field.
- The invited speakers will identify the three most interesting poster contributions. These will be presented on the second day for 15 minutes each, and the best one will be awarded with the Prize for Applied Research in Complexity Science.
- Each invited talk will consist of a 40 minute presentation an a 10 minute discussion. This allows for about 12 invited presentations on the first and second day and about the same number of contributed talks on the third day. Sufficient breaks and a workshop dinner on the first day serve for personal discussions and established complexity scientists, and between business and academic people, between young and established complexity scientists, and bewtween business representatives and PhD students. For maximum cross fertilization, the number of participants is limited to about 60 people.
Deliverables
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Deliverable 1.1 Workshops
- The planned deliverable, the workshop on Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Government and Media was met on time and below budget (see below). Since funds were left over from this workshop, they were offered to support satellite workshops at the ECCS 2007 in Dresden (see WP8). A report of these workshops is given below. In turned out that due to the large number of participants and related conference fees, ECCS 2007 did not require to use the money of GIACS WP1 reserved for it. Consequently the remaining funds were used for a workshop similar to the 2006 workshop, on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences held in Zurich on 2008 (see below). Consequently, this deliverable has three reports, on one each of these events: