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Dirk Helbing | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 19, 1965 |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen (1986)[13] |
| Known for | Social force model, crowd simulation, traffic simulation, pedestrian microsimulation, complex systems, computational social science |
| Awards | Golden Idea Award 2012[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Complex Systems, Computational Social Science |
| Institutions | ETH Zurich (2007–)[2] TU Delft (2015)[3] University of Oxford (2010)[4] (host: Peter Hedström) Harvard University (2010)[5] (hosts: Martin Nowak, Nicholas A. Christakis) INRETS (2004) (host: Patrick Lebacque)[6] TU Dresden (2000)[7] Collegium Budapest, Hungary (2000)[8] Tel Aviv University (1999) (hosts: Isaac Goldhirsch, Eshel Ben-Jacob)[9] Eötvös Loránd University (1998) (host: Tamás Vicsek) Xerox PARC (1998) (host: Bernardo Huberman)[10] Weizmann Institute of Science (1997) (host: David Mukamel)[11] University of Stuttgart (1996)[12] |
| Doctoral advisor | Wolfgang Weidlich |
| Other academic advisors | Manfred R. Schroeder |
Dirk Helbing (born January 19, 1965) is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and affiliate of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich.
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.[14] In 1996, he completed further studies on traffic dynamics and optimization.
In 2000, he became a full professor and Managing Director of the Institute for Transport and Economics at Dresden University of Technology.[15] Helbing was elected as a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2008[16] and of the World Academy of Art and Science in 2016.[17] In January 2014 Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).[18][19] 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".[20]
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]
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]
In February 2022, during a lecture Professor Dirk Helbing presented a slide that some students from ETH Zurich considered inappropriate and insensitive to the Chinese community.[115][116] The students raise their concerns both to Professor Helbing and the ETH Zurich Ombudsman and Respect Advice Center, the latter of which provides services related to inappropriate behaviours, discrimination, bullying or allegations at the Institute. A group of Chinese students also wrote open letters to ETH Zurich to address this issue.
This allegations by the students were mentioned on LinkedIn and received a lot of comments from students and researchers worldwide.[117] In addition, it was mentioned that Professor Dirk Helbing received death threats.[118]
Following an investigation and discussion with the ETH Zurich Ombudsman and Respect Advice center, Professor Dirk Helbing presented an apology statement on Twitter[119] and LinkedIn Accounts.[120] The ETH Zurich Twitter account also mentioned the apology[121] from Professor Dirk Helbing. Despite the persistent controversies and ongoing expressions of disappointment from the society, ETH Zurich proceeded to close the issue.
