Opening the frontiers of tomorrow's research

NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology) is a new activity in the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). It aims to support unconventional and visionary research with the potential to open new fields for European science and technology, as well as research on potential problems uncovered by science.

NEST is designed to be flexible and interdisciplinary research is encouraged. There are no restrictions on the scientific fields to be addressed except that the research carried out under NEST should cut across or lie outside the thematic priority areas. NEST will not support projects which simply cannot find their home in one of FP6's thematic priorities.

In addition to developing new scientific understanding and capabilities, and opening up new fields, NEST activities aim to consolidate European efforts in emerging fields of research and assist in planning future activities in support to a European Research Area. They will help to nurture themes that will need larger-scale support in future European research programmes.

NEST involves three complementary Action Lines, each contributing to the overall goal of improving European anticipation of future scientific and technological needs.

The overall budget for NEST within FP6 is € 215 million.

GIACS - Relevance to the objectives of NEST

The science of complexity is emerging as a synthesis of many discoveries over the last hundred years, and the new ideas that have come from them. These domains include physical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology; social sciences such as psychology, sociology, political science, economics, history and geography; the arts such as literature, music, dance; and mathematics, philosophy, religion, and ethics. Historically these domains emerged as knowledge grew and specialisation became a practical necessity. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries these divisions became formalised through the establishment of professional scientific and scholarly organisations that set barriers to entry, and the requirement that rigorous apprenticeships such as the PhD and habilitation should be served before a person could practice within a field. By the mid twentieth century it became normal for scholars to have great depth of knowledge in one domain, and to be almost totally ignorant of the methods and cultures of the others. At the same time, human society was facing new kinds of problems never experienced before. Our world is now characterised by the need to design, plan and manage very complex socio-technical systems.

A characteristic of this new complexity is that it transcends the traditional discipline boundaries. For example, the problem of road traffic congestion involves understanding why people and business locate where they do, why they want to make trips, how they make those trips given the available infrastructure, how this varies with the weather and seasons, and how the physical and social subsystems co-evolve through micro and macro time. As another example, the provision of a national health care system involves spending billions of Euros for millions of people demanding the latest medical services provided by millions of other people in nationally distributed infrastructure with equipment provided and installed by many thousands of suppliers. As a final example, the problem of building commercial aeroplanes is immensely complicated and expensive, involving the application of advanced physical engineering and management of many complex human, economic, and technical processes.

When those in business, commerce, industry and public administration approach traditional discipline-based scientists for help with their practical problems they can at best get partial solutions. Neatly partitioning knowledge into fiercely defended territories cannot provide answers to messy practical socio-technical problems, and science can appear to be self-obsessed, irrelevant and unhelpful in ‘the real world’. In contrast, complex science has grown out of those messy problems, and the need to provide practical solutions to them. The emerging science of complexity includes many new ideas, including, in no particular order, problem-solving by searching spaces of possibilities; chaotic dynamics and computational irreducibility; combinatorial explosion of large numbers of interacting heterogeneous elements; multilevel lattice-hierarchical structure, discrete versus continuous representation and language; transmission of system dynamics through chains of connection, path dependence; incomplete, inconsistent heterogeneous data; system time, structural events, and dynamics; complex adaptive systems, evolution and co-evolution; dissipative structures; autopoiesis and self organisation; simulation and possible worlds.

The problems addressed by GIACS Coordination Action are therefore:

• The need to connect industry, business, commerce and the public services with complexity scientists able to address the complex systems phenomena that characterise practical problems.
• The need to assist those willing to cross the formidable barriers between entrenched academic domains to do so, by coordinating the opportunities provided by individual scientists and institutions willing to support multidisciplinary cooperation and knowledge transfer.
• The need to coordinate education and dissemination of the ideas emerging in the science of complexity to help produce a new generation of cross-disciplinary complexity scientists.
• The need to form strong and appropriate network structure for the emerging community of complexity scientists, to support rapid communication of new ideas, applications and opportunities between specialisms, and between complexity community and business, commercial, industrial, and public service communities.