Current Grants

CABDyN Complexity Centre and the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, in collaboration with British Telecommunications (BT) and other industry and academic partners, has just received funding to pursue a project called SATURN (Self-organising Adaptive Technology Underlying Resilient Networks). The aim of the project is to use autonomous artificial intelligence techniques and self-organising networks to create Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) systems that are more resilient and dependable than current methods. To achieve this goal, the project will focus on how self-managing intelligent services can enable the use of critical network data feeds in real time, and will develop and validate novel tools and techniques for visualising and understanding these complex interdependencies.

In addition, this work will build on the underlying theory of complex networks in the CNI domain, and create new capabilities for modelling and simulating these complex networks. The end result will be an advanced demonstrator that displays ultra-resilient service capabilities. This £3.2m project is being led by British Telecommunications in collaboration with Northrop Grumman UK, Imperial College London, Warwick University, University of Oxford Said Business School and Oxford's CABDyN Complexity Centre. It has been funded by the Technology Strategy Board Research and Development Competition under their ‘Network Security Innovation Platform’ and will begin work in the Autumn.

A 3-year project entitled “ICTeCollective – Harnessing ICT-enabled Collective Social Behaviour” is being funded by a European Commission Framework 7 “Future and Emerging Technologies” grant. The Specific Targeted Research Project, running from 1st October 2009 to 30th September 2012, is co-ordinated by the Helsinki University of Technology.  The European partners on the project are the University of Oxford, Torino Institute for Scientific Interchange, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Warsaw University.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is funding a 30-month research project on “Scaling in Complex Systems” which runs from 15th of May 2009 to 14th May 2012. CABDyN is a partner on this project, which is being led by Imperial College in collaboration with Professor Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and University of Oxford.

Under the "Fundamentals of Complexity Science" Initiative, the EPSRC has funded a three-year research project on 'Modelling the temporal dynamics of social, economic and communication networks from large-scale empirical datasets', which runs from 1st April 2008 to 31st March 2011.

The Laboratory of Computational Engineering of Helsinki University of Technology is funding a Junior Research Fellowship in Computational Complex Systems and Networks Research at Wolfson College, Oxford. The Fellowship runs from 1st August 2006 for a period of three years. The Laboratory is also funding a three year post-graduate studentship in Computational Complex Systems and Networks Research, which runs from 1st October 2007.

The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society is funding the CABDyN Seminar Series for the period 1st August 2008 - 31st July 2011

Funding History

MMCOMNET (Measuring and Modelling Complex Networks Across Domains) Specific Targeted Research Project – CABDyN received significant funding from the European Commission through the NEST Pathfinder Initiative on Tackling Complexity in Science. The MMCOMNET project (Contract No. 12999), for which Oxford was the scientific coordinator, was carried out in collaboration with 5 other European partners (ETH Zurich, INSEAD, Technical University Dresden, Warsaw University of Technology, University of Stockholm), and ran from the 1st February 2005 to the 31st May 2008. Oxford was also a partner in the ONCE-CS project which ran from the 1st July 2005 to the 31st March 2008, in which Oxford led Work Package 3 on Thematic Schools. The GIACS (General Integration of the Applications of Complexity in Science) Coordination Action (Contract no. 12380), for which Oxford was a partner, ran from 15th July 2005 to 14th January 2009. The coordinator for GIACS was the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Turin, Italy.

The Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation funded a Postdoctoral Research Assistantship between 1st July and 31st December 2008 for a project entitled 'Modelling the Effects of Status and Reputation in a Large Interfirm Network'.

Seed funding to establish a research cluster was provided as of 1st July 2003 for six months by the EPRSC under the Novel Computation Initiative (Grant No. GR/S63090/01). Bridging support for the complex systems cluster was received from the Oxford University Research Development Fund for a period of 6 months as of 1st February 2004. As of 1st January 2005 the Oxford University Research Development Fund awarded a 2-year grant providing development support for the CABDyN research cluster, which was augmented by contributions from the Saïd Business School.

In addition to grants developing the CABDyN infrastructure, CABDyN members have held a number of grants relating to specific research problems. The EPSRC funded a project on Understanding Group Formation and the Collective Movement of Locusts (Grant No. GR/S04765/01) for three years from 1st March 2003. Cross-over projects were funded by the NERC for Resource-Related Redistribution of Nitrogen in Woodland Fungi (Grant No. NER/A/S/2002/00882) for three years from January 2004 and by the BBSRC for In Vivo Mapping of N-metabolism During Foraging for Patchy Resources by Cord-Forming Basidiomycetes (Grant No. 43/P19284) for three years from 22nd March 2003. The EPSRC funded a project on Understanding Complex Adaptive Networks in the Life Sciences (Grant No. EP/D001382/1) for a period of one year as of 1st October 2005.