FuturICT and Social Sciences: Big Data, Big Thinking

Rosaria Conte, Nigel Gilbert, Giulia Bonelli, and Dirk Helbing (19 July 2011)

Imagine storing all the computational information produced in the world in just one year: you would have a pile of DVDs able to reach the Moon and back. How about all the data collected since the beginning of the computer era? The quantity is so huge that traditional units of measurement cannot cope. For this reason a few years ago computer scientists started talking about “Big Data”, referring to the gathering, formatting, analysing and manipulating of a massive amount of digital information.
Guest Editorial: Achilles' heels of current economic theories - The debate

Dirk Helbing, ETHZ, Switzerland (18 April 2011)

A guest editorial by Dirk Helbing (ETHZ, Switzerland) presenting an ongoing debate on the Achilles' heels of current economic theories.
Worrying signs of “new thinking”

YC Zhang (12 April 2010)

During the spectacular financial market crashes and the resulted recession, there has been renewed assault on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) and its theoretical basis—mainstream economics. George Soros announced Oct. 2009 that he will put 50 million dollars over ten years to establish an “Institute for New Economic Thinking”.
Solving the apparent diversity-accuracy dilemma of recommender systems

Fribourg team (24 March 2010)

Focus of our research group changes in time and so it happened that in the last few years we were thinking more about information filtering than about financial markets. As a landmark of this period, we recently got a paper published in PNAS.
Registration and paper upload problems fixed

Econophysics Team (6 May 2009)

The problems that some users have experienced uploading papers or registering with Econophysics Forum have been fixed. Many thanks for your patience while we tracked down the source of this problem!
New functionality at the Econophysics Forum

Fribourg Team (1 May 2009)

After an off-period (which was longer than expected and for which we apologize), we are glad to have the Econophysics Forum up again with some new functionality added.
Economics needs a scientific revolution

Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (9 January 2009)

Compared to physics, it seems fair to say that the quantitative success of the economic sciences is disappointing. Rockets fly to the moon, energy is extracted from minute changes of atomic mass without major havoc, global positioning satellites help millions of people to find their way home. What is the flagship achievement of economics, apart from its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises, including the current worldwide credit crunch?
Fribourg Symposium

Yi-Cheng Zhang and Damien Challet (16 October 2008)

Last November we had an exciting gathering of many people who are/were physicists or other natural scientists but are working in finance, insurance and related sectors -- an occasion built upon the so-called econophysics community that brought together both academics and practitioners in an intimate encounter.
A new face for Econophysics Forum

Yi-Cheng Zhang and Joseph Wakeling (30 April 2008)

Econophysics Forum is now 10 years old — and though the old interface has served its time honourably, it is well due an update. From the beginning our aim was to create a platform to foster and facilitate cooperation and communication among researchers in our field. The huge advances in web development and technology since then mean that it is now possible to create functionality that perhaps could not even be dreamed of in 1998. We have begun our overhaul with an update of the graphical interface and a cleaning-out and streamlining of website code, without affecting its functionality. This is however only the first step on a longer journey to redevelop Econophysics Forum as a genuinely collaborative platform.
Symposium on agent-based modeling, risk, and finance

Yi-Cheng Zhang (16 October 2007)

Can physicists beat the markets?<br> A retrospective of the first ten years of Econophysics and prospects.
Collective Evaluation Project <br> An application of the "new information theory"

Yi-Cheng Zhang (14 June 2005)

As if it were yesterday, Econophysics Forum web site actually is seven years old. Around the summer of 1998 a handful of my colleagues who later to be labelled as ’econophysicists’ were wondering how to tap the then new WWW phenomenon to foster the fledging community. The dream was to have a kind of ‘virtual institute’, enabling scientists working on the margins of the traditional disciplines and institutions to mingle and work together. Seven years is a long period, especially in the Information Age. The original vision didn’t bear out completely, but it was an interesting experiment leveraging then primitive web technologies and to have gathered a consistent crowd among the physicists and other scholars in the interdisciplinary domain.
The great econophysics debate<br /> (source: "Econophysicists Matter", Editorial, Nature 441(7094) (2006): 667)

(14 June 2005)

Economics and physics are two disciplines that, contrary to widespread perceptions, have significant common agendas. Shame, then, that the professionals don't do more to recognize the fact. After hearing a talk on the application of physics to the social sciences, a physicist in a notoriously traditional department was heard to mutter that it was all very well but it wasn't 'real physics'. It was an article of faith to him that many-body theories in physics could not be applied to animate objects. Now that it seems clear that bacteria, locusts and even road traffic undergo types of dynamic phase transition, this objection is hard to sustain.
Econophysics-inspired New Year thoughts

Hassan Masum (19 December 2004)

In the spirit of a New Year's resolution, consider the character of Econophysics itself. Two attributes of the field stand out: i) the application of careful and (where possible) rigorous modeling and simulation, to ii) questions of socio-economic systems...
Brian Arthur's Foreword to the <a HREF="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198566409/102-2111408-6206503?v=glance">Minority Game Book</a>

Brian Arthur (19 June 2004)

Once in a while a model problem appears that is simple to describe but offers a wealth of lessons. If the model problem is a classic — like the Ising model or the Prisoner’s Dilemma — it both opens up our insight and gives us analytical pathways into an intriguing world. Challet, Marsili and Zhang’s Minority Game problem is such a model. It is a classic
Human players are invited to challenge Minority Game players

Yi-Cheng Zhang (27 March 2003)

In the past few months we (Fribourg University econophysics group) have been testing an online interactive Minority Game that can be played around the globe via the World Wide Web. A human player is pitted against a few dozen adaptive MG players whose information capacity is very bounded, with an adjustable range---hence various levels of difficulty.
Goodbye to Per

Yi-Cheng Zhang (29 October 2002)

Last week Per Bak passed away, after a long heroic battle against a nasty disease. For many people in the interdisciplinary physics, especially in Econophysics, the loss is irreplaceable: for Per is unique in his penetrating insight, broad scope and a flair for simple beauty in physics and science.
Guest Commentary by Paul Ormerod, Author of 'Butterfly Economics'.<br> Econophysics: Achievements, Dangers and Challenges

Paul Ormerod (6 September 2002)

Econophysics as a concept has now been around for several years. Conferences are starting to be held in the name of the discipline -- the Bali jamboree being the latest example. Time for an economist's opinion on the ADC of econophysics: its achievements to date, the potential dangers faced by physicists coming into economics, and the challenges if econophysics is to make a decisive impact on economics.
A beautiful piece of Economics got Nobel!

Yi-Cheng Zhang (1 October 2001)

Last week Bank of Sweden awarded the <a href="http://www.unifr.ch/econophysics/comments/13PRIZ.html">Nobel Memorial Prize</a> in Economics to three economists <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000080955oct11.story">George Akerlof</a> et al.. While in the past the <a href="http://www.unifr.ch/econophysics/comments/13PRIZ.html">economics prizes</a> are hardly intelligeable to the outsiders of the profession, the work started by George Akerlof is so simple and beautiful as well as practical that I cannot recommend too highly for physicists to have a look.
A Tale of Two Directions

Yi-Cheng Zhang (1 April 2001)

The statistical Mechanics Community used to be a unified fraternality inside the greater physics discipline. We recall that in the golden eighties there were such romantic themes as the then-emergent field: pattern formation, fractals, DLA, SOC, interfaces...to which even some of the most prominent physicists gravitated. No longer. The Community as we know it doesn't exist any more, even though grand meetings like <A HREF="http://varea.ifisicacu.unam.mx/statphys.htm">Statphys21</A> still attract hundreds, but it seems more like an Old-Boys-Club than a place to look up for clues of new directions and inspirations.
Let the debate begin

Yi-Cheng Zhang (1 December 2000)

<I>Le Monde</I> published an unusual article [<A HREF="http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,111257,00.html"><I>"premier appel"</I></A>] , [<A HREF="http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,111256,00.html"><I>"contre appel"</I></A>], an appeal of over two hundreds economists of elite French hautes ecoles publicly aired their rebelion against what is called Neo-classical economics, especially the formal math models without pratical relevance. And there is also a pitiful defense of about fifteen economists calling for mercy and reason. I thank Erico Scalas for suggesting to us this piece of news.
Physicists' New Adventure

Yi-Cheng Zhang (1 February 1999)

After long months waiting, finally we are able to present this interactive site. The need of a web site is well recognized: since we, physicists doing economy-related research, are marginal to both communities: economics and physics. The hope is that this site would serve as a catalyst at fostering the exciting new field of "econophysics".