Dirk Helbing

Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences of ETH Zurich and affiliate at its Computer Science Department. In 2014, he received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), where he led the PhD school in “Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future”. Dirk Helbing started as a physicist. With his diploma thesis, he initiated the area of pedestrian, crowd, and evacuation modeling and simulation. During his PhD and habilitation in physics, he helped establish the fields of socio-, econo- and traffic physics. He was also co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DPG). He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP), and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative, he helped establish data science and computational social science as well as global systems science.

The work of Prof. Helbing is documented by hundreds of scientific works and media reports. Besides publications in Nature, Science, and PNAS, there are also four popular books addressing conceptual, ethical, and strategic issues related to digital societies: «Thinking Ahead» (Apr. 2015), and «Towards Digital Enlightenment» (Aug. 2018), «Next Civilization» (Feb. 2021) and «Finance 4.0» (May 2021).