Dirk Helbing

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. 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". However, the project lost in the final round of the application for funding from the European Commission of €1 billion. Despite this, the ideas developed by the group have influenced international research programs. Since 2017, the FuturICT 2.0 project is being funded by the European Commission's FLAG-ERA program.

The work of Prof. Helbing has been widely cited in the media and academia and he has written more than 10 papers in Nature, Science and PNAS. In 2012, he won the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative, he helped to further develop disciplines such as data science, computational social science, and global systems science in Europe. 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. Helbing worked for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. He was elected member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and now belongs to the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He sits in the Boards of the Global Brain Institute in Brussels and the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva. He is also involved in the activities of "Staatslabor" (a Swiss government science iniative) as well as the establishment of the Blockchain [X] initiative and the Blockchain Lab in Delft. He is a member of a Swiss governmental advisory group on the societal impact of digitization and was lead author of a "Digital Manifesto" on how to safeguard democratic values in the digital age. Prof. Helbing is an adviser to the Citizen Science Center Zurich and is an advocate of a European Charter of Digital Human Rights.

In 2000, he became a full professor and Managing Director of the Institute for Transport and Economics at Dresden University of Technology. Helbing was elected as a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2008 and of the World Academy of Art and Science in 2016. In January 2014 Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Since June 2015 he is affiliate professor at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft, where he leads the PhD school in "Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future".

Dirk Helbing studied physics and mathematics at the University of Göttingen. He completed his doctoral thesis at Stuttgart University, on modeling social processes by means of game-theoretical approaches, stochastic methods, and complex systems theory. In 1996, he completed further studies on traffic dynamics and optimization.