General info

The co-ordinator and four partners will carry out the research project. The co-ordinator is the Faculty of Physics and the Center of Excellence for Complex Systems Research at Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) represented by Prof. Janusz Hołyst (participant CO1). The partners are:
CR2 - S.U.P.R.A.S. & G.R.A.S.P group - University of Liege, Belgium;
CR3 - Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI) of the Royal
  Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), Netherlands;
CR4 - Research Institute for Advanced Technologies and School of Computing and
  Information Technology (SCIT) at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K.
CR5 - Faculty of Informatics -  University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

       CR2 is represented by Prof. Marcel Ausloos. CR3 is represented by Dr. Andrea Scharnhorst. CR4 is represented by Dr. Mike Thelwall. CR5 is represented by Prof. Dorothea Wagner.
       All of these are internationally known scientific groups, who have managed or contributed to many successful collaborative projects in the past, including participation in many European and national programmes such as SUPRAS, WISER, COSIN, COST, EXYSTENCE.
        Each of the partners has developed their own specific approach. An important reason for the partners to join in the consortium is their expectation that this combination of expertise will enable the production of results that otherwise would have been more difficult or impossible to discover.

        CO1 is experienced in physical, social and network-based models. As a leader of the Center of Excellence for Complex Systems Research CO1 has appropriate knowledge with which coordinate the whole project devoted to evolving networks. CR2 is a specialist in the theory of phase transitions as well as their interdisciplinary applications and will give strong contribution to the study of critical events from a theoretical point of view. CR3 has extensive competence in the field of mediated information and communication in research. Workpackage WP4 exactly fits with its sociological competencies. CR3 also hosts important databases that will be used during the project. CR4 has developed quantitative-lead research methods for identifying and analysing web phenomena. CR4 is also skilled in gathering data from the web, part of its workpackage in the project. CR5 has a strong scientific reputation in the field of algorithms engineering and visualization tools for network dynamics. Each participant is assigned to lead one workpackage which covers its specific skills. The way interactions between participants directly correspond to interactions between tasks is illustrated in figure B6.2. Although the partners of the project have experience in mutual common research projects (WISER, COST), the consortium itself is a novel network of collaboration.

      The project will not only have a strategic impact on the scientific community and policy makers but also on the consortium partners themselves.

     CO1 is continuously extending its research on evolving networks. So far only structural properties of complex networks have been investigated. With this project CO1 hopes to increase its competencies for network dynamics. Recently the research group headed by the coordinator of CREEN project has begun to develop at its university a new specialization ‘Econo- and socio-physics’. The post-doc position provided for the CREEN project will significantly strengthen the research abilities of the group in this area.

     The fields of  research of the CR2 group pertain to applying modern methods of statistical physics, like scaling laws and critical exponents, to unusual problems in physics, meteorology, economics, and sociology, with an emphasis on self-organized spatio-temporal complex (non-linear dynamical) phenomena and critical events. The collaboration within the proposed project is of great interest for the group looking for multidisciplinary formations and humanistic impact for its research  work.

      CR3 has extended competence in the field of mediated information and communication in research. Participation in the CREEN project and collaboration with physicists dealing with complex systems and critical phenomena will enable CR3 to look into its research objects from a completely different point of view and will help to quantitatively describe the observed phenomena.

       The collaboration in this project will greatly enhance the CR4 group's current investigations, which already have an European focus, and will also facilitate the development of additional knowledge areas in science policy research that will enable the production of practical tools as future outcomes for the current mainly theoretical investigations.

       Current research interests of CR5 include discrete optimization and graph algorithms applied to static aspects of network visualization. The participation in the CREEN project will enable CR5 to extend investigations to visualization of dynamic changes in networks and implementing the algorithms to real-world problems.