European Commission Framework 7 'Future and Emerging Technologies' Grant

The CABDyN Complexity Centre, the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (InSIS) and the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford will contribute to a new research project supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework.  The project, entitled “Harnessing ICT-enabled Collective Social Behaviour” (ICTeCollective), is funded by the Future and Emerging Technologies Unit of the European Commission’s Information Society and Media Directorate-General. This €2.5 million effort aims to develop a systematic approach to exploring, modelling and understanding environments where information and communication technologies (ICT) are intrinsically entangled with evolving social structures.

The project will look at questions such as how the role of face-to-face encounters may change when social contexts are increasingly defined by new and emerging technologies; how new ICT-mediated groups and communities emerge and collaborate, and to what extent and how they overcome limitations such as distance or lack of a common platform; and whether this may ultimately lead to the appearance of novel forms of human behaviour at the collective level. With a launch date of 1 October 2009, the project will be coordinated by Professor Kimmo Kaski of Helsinki University of Technology, and involves partner institutions in Italy, Hungary, and Poland as well as Oxford.  Oxford’s effort will be led by CABDyN Co-Director Felix Reed-Tsochas, in close collaboration with Robin Dunbar, who heads the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology.