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By Gareth Morgan Technology reporter
It could be one of the most ambitious computer projects ever conceived.
An international group of scientists are aiming to create a simulator that can
replicate everything happening on Earth - from global weather patterns and the
spread of diseases to international financial transactions or congestion on
Milton Keynes' roads.
Nicknamed the Living Earth Simulator (LES), the project aims to advance the
scientific understanding of what is taking place on the planet, encapsulating
the human actions that shape societies and the environmental forces that define
the physical world.
"Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities,
wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is
apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the
economy work," says Dr Helbing, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology,
who chairs the FuturICT project which aims to create the simulator.
Knowledge collider
Thanks to projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator
built by Cern, scientists know more about the early universe than they do about
our own planet, claims Dr Helbing.
What is needed is a knowledge accelerator, to collide different branches of
knowledge, he says.
"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the
most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."
The result would be the LES. It would be able to predict the spread of
infectious diseases, such as Swine Flu, identify methods for tackling climate
change or even spot the inklings of an impending financial crisis, he says.
Large Hadron Collider Is it possible to build a social science equivalent to
the Large Hadron Collider?
But how would such colossal system work?
For a start it would need to be populated by data - lots of it - covering the
entire gamut of activity on the planet, says Dr Helbing.
It would also be powered by an assembly of yet-to-be-built supercomputers
capable of carrying out number-crunching on a mammoth scale.
Although the hardware has not yet been built, much of the data is already being
generated, he says.
For example, the Planetary Skin project, led by US space agency Nasa, will see
the creation of a vast sensor network collecting climate data from air, land,
sea and space.
In addition, Dr Helbing and his team have already identified more than 70
online data sources they believe can be used including Wikipedia, Google Maps
and the UK government's data repository Data.gov.uk.
Drowning in data
Integrating such real-time data feeds with millions of other sources of data -
from financial markets and medical records to social media - would ultimately
power the simulator, says Dr Helbing.
The next step is create a framework to turn that morass of data in to models
that accurately replicate what is taken place on Earth today.
Start Quote
We don't take any action on the information we have
End Quote Pete Warden OpenHeatMaps
That will only be possible by bringing together social scientists and computer
scientists and engineers to establish the rules that will define how the LES
operates.
Such work cannot be left to traditional social science researchers, where
typically years of work produces limited volumes of data, argues Dr Helbing.
Nor is it something that could have been achieved before - the technology
needed to run the LES will only become available in the coming decade, he adds.
Human behaviour
For example, while the LES will need to be able to assimilate vast oceans of
data it will simultaneously have to understand what that data means.
That becomes possible as so-called semantic web technologies mature, says Dr
Helbing.
Today, a database chock-full of air pollution data would look much the same to
a computer as a database of global banking transactions - essentially just a
lot of numbers.
But semantic web technology will encode a description of data alongside the
data itself, enabling computers to understand the data in context.
What's more, our approach to aggregating data stresses the need to strip out
any of that information that relates directly to an individual, says Dr
Helbing.
Crowd wearing face masks The Living Earth Simulator aims to predict how
diseases spread
That will enable the LES to incorporate vast amounts of data relating to human
activity, without compromising people's privacy, he argues.
Once an approach to carrying out large-scale social and economic data is agreed
upon, it will be necessary to build supercomputer centres needed to crunch that
data and produce the simulation of the Earth, says Dr Helbing.
Generating the computational power to deal with the amount of data needed to
populate the LES represents a significant challenge, but it's far from being a
showstopper.
If you look at the data-processing capacity of Google, it's clear that the LES
won't be held back by processing capacity, says Pete Warden, founder of the
OpenHeatMap project and a specialist on data analysis.
While Google is somewhat secretive about the amount of data it can process, in
May 2010 it was believed to use in the region of 39,000 servers to process an
exabyte of data per month - that's enough data to fill 2 billion CDs every
month.
Reality mining
If you accept that only a fraction of the "several hundred exabytes of data
being produced worldwide every year would be useful for a world simulation,
the bottleneck won't be the processing capacity," says Mr Warden.
"Getting access to the data will be much more of a challenge, as will figuring
out something useful to do with it," he adds.
Simply having lots of data isn't enough to build a credible simulation of the
planet, argues Warden. "Economics and sociology have consistently failed to
produce theories with strong predictive powers over the last century, despite
lots of data gathering. I'm sceptical that larger data sets will mark a big
change," he says.
"It's not that we don't know enough about a lot of the problems the world
faces, from climate change to extreme poverty, it's that we don't take any
action on the information we do have," he argues.
Regardless of the challenges the project faces, the greater danger is not
attempting to use the computer tools we have now - and will have in future - to
improve our understanding of global socio-economic trends, says Dr Helbing.
"Over the past years, it has for example become obvious that we need better
indicators than the gross national product to judge societal development and
well-being," he argues.
At it's heart, the LES is about working towards better methods to measure the
state of society, he says, which would account for health, education and
environmental issues. "And last but not least, happiness."