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]
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Patrick A. Lee is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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