Research activities
Dirk Helbing started out as a physicist. His diploma thesis focussed on pedestrian, crowd, and evacuation modeling and simulation. [21] During his PhD and habilitation in physics, [22] he helped to establish the fields of socio-, econo- and traffic physics. [23] [24] He was also co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DPG). [25] As a visiting scientist at Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute in Israel, the Eötvös University in Budapest, and Xerox PARC in California, he focused on a broad variety of complex systems - including the self-organisation of pedestrians, [26] traffic jams, [27] bacterial patterns, [28] and Mexican waves. [29] At Dresden University of Technology he became the Managing Director of the Institute of Transport & Economics, [30] worked on traffic assistant systems (i.e. early self-driving cars) [31] [32] and a self-organized traffic light control system, [33] [34] [35] which was patented. [36] He found that crowd disasters are caused by a phenomenon called "crowd turbulence" and worked on ways to describe, reduce and respond to such disasters. [37] As professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich, he worked on evolutionary game theory [38] [39] and agent-based computer simulations of social processes and phenomena. [40]
The work of Prof. Helbing has been widely cited in the media and academia and he has written more than 10 papers in Nature, [41] Science [42] and PNAS. [43] In 2012, he won the Idee Suisse Award. [44] He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, [45] the Risk Center, [46] the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) [47] and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). [48] While coordinating the FuturICT initiative, [49] [50] he helped to further develop disciplines such as data science, computational social science, and global systems science in Europe. [51] This work resulted in the establishment of the Nervousnet Platform, a smartphone app enabling users to share data to be used to achieve scientific and social goals and lay the groundwork for digital democracy. [52] [53] Helbing worked for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. [54] He was elected member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute [55] and now belongs to the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. [56] He sits in the Boards of the Global Brain Institute in Brussels [57] and the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva. [58] He is also involved in the activities of "Staatslabor" (a Swiss government science initiative) [59] as well as the establishment of the Blockchain [X] [60] initiative and the Blockchain Lab in Delft. [61] [62] He is a member of a Swiss governmental advisory group on the societal impact of digitization [63] [64] and was lead author of a "Digital Manifesto" on how to safeguard democratic values in the digital age. [65] Prof. Helbing is an adviser to the Citizen Science Center Zurich [66] and is an advocate of a European Charter of Digital Human Rights. [67]
Dirk Helbing is known for the social force model, [68] in particular its application to self-organising phenomena in pedestrian crowds. [69] [70] [71] [72] [73] [74] [75] [76] Besides the slower-is-faster effect, [75] [77] he introduced the freezing-by-heating effect [78] and the phase diagram of congested traffic states. [79] [80] [81] Helbing also proposed a microscopic foundation of evolutionary game theory [82] and has studied self-organized behavioral conventions. [83] His work has applied the principles of collective intelligence and self-organized control to the optimization of urban [84] and freeway traffic. [85] He has conducted research into norms and conflict, and the role of success-driven motion for the establishment of cooperation among selfish individuals, [86] socio-inspired technology and techno-social systems, [87] [88] the spread of disaster [89] [90] and crisis management. [91]
Living Earth Simulator
Helbing was the Principal Investigator on a project named FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator and Crisis Relief System, a computing system working on big datasets, conceived as sort of a crystal ball of the world. [92] The core of the system is the Living Earth Simulator, a computing machine attempting "to model global-scale systems — economies, governments, cultural trends, epidemics, agriculture, technological developments, and more — using torrential data streams, sophisticated algorithms, and as much hardware as it takes". [92] However, the project lost in the final round of the application for funding from the European Commission of €1 billion. [92] Despite this, the ideas developed by the group have influenced international research programs. [93] Since 2017, the FuturICT 2.0 project is being funded by the European Commission's FLAG-ERA program. [94]
Noteworthy projects and presentations by Dirk Helbing's research teams in Dresden, Zurich and Delft
- Derivation of the replicator equation in evolutionary game theory [95] and of the self-organization of behavioral conventions from behavioral imitation. [96]
- Creation of an electronic traffic assistance system to reduce traffic jams on freeways (an early algorithm for self-driving cars). [97]
- Invention of a patented [98] self-organized traffic light control system for cities. [99]
- Semiconductor logistic project with Infineon Technologies increasing throughput by 30%. [100]
- Development of the "social force model", frequently used for pedestrian and crowd simulation. [101]
- Establishment of an expert team to improve the safety of pilgrimages. [102]
- Data-based agent-based simulation study on the Middle Eastern conflict in Jerusalem. [103]
- Publication "How to save human lives: What complexity science and information systems can contribute". [104]
- Patent: "Interaction Support Processor" - Ethically aligned design for information systems. [105]
- Nervousnet App - the Internet of Things as a Citizen Web (in development). [106]
- Grippenet App for anonymous cooperative health monitoring (in development). [107]
- Speech at the Out of the Box Conference with World Thinkers and the Dalai Lama on May 16, 2012. [108]
- Declaration of "Digital Democracy" at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin on November 9, 2015. [109]
- Talk at the "Build Peace" Conference in Zurich on September 11, 2016: "A New Paradigm for World Peace Is Possible". [110]
- BIOTS - Blockchain and Internet of Things School at ETH Zurich, founded in 2016. [111]
- Co-founded Zurich Hub for Ethics and Technology in (2016). [112]
- Article in Nature, "Sustainable development: Turn war rooms into peace rooms", Dirk Helbing and Peter Seele, September 28, 2017. [113]
- Interview at "Petersberger Gespräche" 2017 (Bonn, German) on September 16, 2017: "Artificial Intelligence - from feasibility and superintelligence to planning and envisioning the future". [114]
A crowd is as a group of people that have gathered for a common purpose or intent. Examples are a demonstration, a sports event, or a looting. A crowd may also simply be made up of many people going about their business in a busy area.
In the study of complex networks, assortative mixing, or assortativity, is a bias in favor of connections between network nodes with similar characteristics. In the specific case of social networks, assortative mixing is also known as homophily. The rarer disassortative mixing is a bias in favor of connections between dissimilar nodes.
The percolation threshold is a mathematical concept in percolation theory that describes the formation of long-range connectivity in random systems. Below the threshold a giant connected component does not exist; while above it, there exists a giant component of the order of system size. In engineering and coffee making, percolation represents the flow of fluids through porous media, but in the mathematics and physics worlds it generally refers to simplified lattice models of random systems or networks (graphs), and the nature of the connectivity in them. The percolation threshold is the critical value of the occupation probability p, or more generally a critical surface for a group of parameters p1, p2, ..., such that infinite connectivity (percolation) first occurs.
The Landau–Zener formula is an analytic solution to the equations of motion governing the transition dynamics of a two-state quantum system, with a time-dependent Hamiltonian varying such that the energy separation of the two states is a linear function of time. The formula, giving the probability of a diabatic transition between the two energy states, was published separately by Lev Landau, Clarence Zener, Ernst Stueckelberg, and Ettore Majorana, in 1932.
Ferromagnetic superconductors are materials that display intrinsic coexistence of ferromagnetism and superconductivity. They include UGe2, URhGe, and UCoGe. Evidence of ferromagnetic superconductivity was also reported for ZrZn2 in 2001, but later reports question these findings. These materials exhibit superconductivity in proximity to a magnetic quantum critical point.
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In condensed matter physics, Luttinger's theorem is a result derived by J. M. Luttinger and J. C. Ward in 1960 that has broad implications in the field of electron transport. It arises frequently in theoretical models of correlated electrons, such as the high-temperature superconductors, and in photoemission, where a metal's Fermi surface can be directly observed.
Active matter is matter composed of large numbers of active "agents", each of which consumes energy in order to move or to exert mechanical forces. Such systems are intrinsically out of thermal equilibrium. Unlike thermal systems relaxing towards equilibrium and systems with boundary conditions imposing steady currents, active matter systems break time reversal symmetry because energy is being continually dissipated by the individual constituents. Most examples of active matter are biological in origin and span all the scales of the living, from bacteria and self-organising bio-polymers such as microtubules and actin, to schools of fish and flocks of birds. However, a great deal of current experimental work is devoted to synthetic systems such as artificial self-propelled particles. Active matter is a relatively new material classification in soft matter: the most extensively studied model, the Vicsek model, dates from 1995.
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Antonio Helio de Castro Neto, often referred to as the 'Godfather of Graphene,' is a Brazilian-born physicist who serves as the founder and director of the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials and as Co-Director of the Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials (IFIM) at the National University of Singapore. He is a condensed matter theorist known for his work in the theory of metals, magnets, superconductors, graphene and two-dimensional materials. He is a distinguished professor in the Departments of Materials Science Engineering, and Physics and a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003. In 2011 he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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