In the chaotic systems lies the solution to our world's problems

A huge social-scientific project with a budget of billions of euros is stirring up Europe. The project will develop a new science and lead to the development of new tools to understand, deal with and plan modern society
The article was first published on 04.05.2012 on the Bar-Ilan University Science Channel website

Paralysis of 200 million cell phones in the US is spreading uncontrollably. A Red Army transmitter appears on the phone screen, suggesting that the attack originated in Russia. The internet in the main cities in the eastern US is crashing and the crisis is spreading. The government does not have the authority to close the phones, and the fear is that the collapse will deepen the government authorities, the military, the financial systems, companies and more. This scenario was initiated by the CNN network and was attended by the key people of the administration, finance and the military, who analyzed the situation and looked for solutions, knowing that a massive cyber attack could break out at any moment. They didn't have an answer.

These examples were presented by Reserve Major Professor Yitzhak Ben Israel, head of the National Research and Development Council and head of the National Cyber ​​Program, in the opening lecture of a unique conference held under the leadership of Bar Ilan and Tel Aviv universities, on the subject of the future of information and communication technologies. Ben Yisrael emphasized that the future battlefield is the cyber war, therefore it is of national importance for Israel to be among the three leading countries in the world in the cyber field. The conference, which took place on Monday, and was organized by Prof. Shlomo Havlin from Bar Ilan University, Prof. Eshel Ben-Yaakov from Tel Aviv University and his research student Dror Kenneth, was attended by academics from the fields of computer science, engineering, economics, social sciences, psychology, physics , mathematics, technology, security and medicine.

"Israel has the best people in these fields. It can become a cyber power. We only need a human resource," says Ben Yaakov. "Information and communication technology is critical for Israel to maintain national security. The systems can easily be disabled, so we must be the leaders in the field."

"This is just one of the scenarios that, in order to prevent them, we must develop a new science that will deal with complex systems", says Havlin. "The collapse of global systems can also happen in other areas. In the field of the economy - we have already seen, in the field of health - the global spread of epidemics, natural disasters that spread to unexpected areas, as we saw in the disaster in Japan and many other scenarios. The scientific community in the world has recently started looking for ways to deal with this type of problem".

In 2009, the European Union announced a program called the "flagship project". It is about the ambition to develop within ten years two innovative scientific projects that will lead to huge breakthroughs, with funding of one billion euros per ten-year project. A project of this type falls into the category of "mega science", similar, for example, to the development of the particle accelerator in Geneva, in which outstanding research groups from many countries will participate, each contributing in its own field. The first phase of the competition ended in early 2011 and out of 26 proposals, six groups were selected to submit full proposals. The first place in the scientific ranking was won by the project on the subject of Future Information and Communication Technologies (FuturICT). Out of the six proposals, two proposals will be selected for financing at the beginning of 2013. The projects that will be selected will change the face of science and society in the world. To understand the magnitude of the project, one can think of the American space program announced by President Kennedy.

"This is a huge project with the participation of about 500 scientists from thirty countries from a variety of scientific fields, from the exact sciences to the social sciences, who will develop a new science that will combine these two disciplines and lead to the development of new tools to understand, deal with and plan modern society," says Kenneth. "For example, in the financial markets there is a flow of information that was not there before. Things happen in unpredictable situations. There is a lot of information that changes all the time and there are not enough tools to deal with it. As markets and trading become more sophisticated, their behavior moves further away from the models and theories in economics. This requires the development of new tools. This is the goal of FuturICT - to improve the social infrastructures, to plan advanced infrastructures that will be more efficient, to give the decision makers tools to deal with the situation and prevent crises and collapses."

The idea of ​​developing new tools that will allow large amounts of information in different fields to be analyzed in real time is invaluable. Today there is a connection between all types of information and one affects the other, therefore any solution must be multidisciplinary. For example, the ability to predict that a comment on Facebook will develop into a sweeping protest requires experts in the fields of information flow in the network, sociologists and experts from the social and political sciences. Another example, vaccinating populations in an optimal way against a disease that is expected to spread requires experts from network theory, immunology, doctors, and more. Is it possible? Can we prevent disasters that cause avalanches of failures, such as the collapse of smartphones, or the collapse of the stock market, or a cyber attack, which, if they happen, will affect every area of ​​our lives?

"In the technological age in which we live, the various systems are becoming more and more dependent on each other. For example, the electricity system depends on the communication that is supposed to regulate the electricity and on the other hand the communication depends on the electricity. "Transportation, banking and medicine also depend on communication and electricity," says Havlin. "In these complex systems, the failure of one component can cause failures in other systems and a multi-system collapse. We plan to develop methods to reduce or prevent such failures if possible."

One of the best tools to investigate problems of complex systems is to understand the behavior of networks. "Most of the phenomena in our lives behave in the form of networks - the Internet, electricity, transportation, society, the spread of diseases and more. We need to know how to characterize the networks well and understand with their help the dynamics of the phenomena and their stability", says Havlin. "Until recently, the focus was mainly on one network, but today we know that they are connected and dependent on each other, and as technology advances, more connections are created between the networks. In the physics department at Bar Ilan, we have developed a mathematical framework that describes how to handle such networks. We discovered a new phenomenon that did not exist in a single network. Because of the interdependencies between the networks, a fall in one network leads to a fall in the others and again in the first network, and eventually a chain of landslides occurs that can lead to the spontaneous collapse of all the networks. This understanding marks a new field that has begun to develop in Israel and is an important component of FuturICT. We have indeed broken the way, but the problem is still far from being solved."

"The FuturICT project is known for its importance from the highest level. This is actually the most fascinating project that can be thought of in the scientific world, which unites the accumulated wisdom of science in all fields and brings out from everyone the knowledge and insights of how to solve problems in the global world in fields that we all depend on. In all of them are the elements that make it possible to solve problems that we never dreamed could be solved," said Prof. Moshe Keva, president of Bar Ilan University, who opened the conference. "In medicine we are faced with amazing technologies in nanotechnology. Minimizing the standards and the connections between them will in the future lead to an extension of life expectancy and an improvement in the quality of life. Natural disasters will be predictable. The technology in our hands will serve as a tremendous tool in solving Israel's security problems, in that it will allow us to assess risks and make decisions. So do crises in politics and demographic problems - they all fall into the same category. The mathematical models will make it possible to predict with a certain probability what is going to happen. The key to progress in solving systemic problems is leaving the focus on the single system and entering a multidisciplinary understanding of the various systems. This is a type of analysis from the world of computers and mathematics in the world of complex and chaotic systems. The FuturICT must be a national project. I see with great satisfaction the importance of making order in disorder, because there, in the chaotic systems lies the solution to our world's problems."