The ultimate goal of the FuturICT Flagship is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our...

We introduce a future orientation index to quantify the degree to which Internet users worldwide seek more information about years in the future than years in the past. We analyse Google logs and find a striking correlation between the country's GDP and the predisposition of its inhabitants to...

Society’s increasing interactions with technology are creating extensive "digital traces" of our collective human behavior. These new data sources are fueling the rapid development of the new field of computational social science. To investigate user attention to the Hurricane Sandy disaster...