Xtranet-ISA

We are faced nowadays with complex problems such as climate change, financial instability, epidemics, social inequality, to name just very few. In addition, human society itself has become ever more complex with interactions taking place not face-to-face but digital or virtual and at large scale among culturally and geographically distant people. To tackle complex societal issues policy makers need accurate, quantitative predictions of human behaviour and interaction based on controlled experimentation with large groups of people. However, current experimental set-ups in social sciences such as behavioural psychology or behavioural economics are limited to only few participants and can therefore not capture real-world complexities.

FET project IBSEN which is deeply rooted in the emerging field of computational social science intends to develop a global societal simulator with a potentially huge impact on research and policymaking. The approach will yield both explanatory and predictive models from large-scale experiments (1000+participants) and their resulting massive ICT data. This will not only allow to study and predict human behavior under real word conditions but also to gain insights on phenomena that only arise in large-scale groups to begin with and therefore do not feature in current experimental set-ups.

More information is available on the website of the EU-funded IBSEN project.