The European Union (EU) has announced the finalization of the EURACE project, which used supercomputing technology to develop advanced financial models designed to help predict and prevent future financial disasters. The three-year EURACE project is based on agent technology known as Flexible Large-scale Agent Modeling Environment (FLAME). The EU says the software stimulates the interactions between different economic actors, such as households and companies, banks and borrowers, and employers and job seekers. “The results of this research project will complement traditional economic statistics and assumptions about how economic actors react by enabling better testing of a policy’s effects on people, while still on the drawing board,” says EU commissioner Viviane Reding. The EU believes that an agent-based approach to financial modeling could create realistic simulations that would be more useful for preventing future recessions. “Agent based modeling is one of the emergent branches of [artificial intelligence] which best demonstrates complex, social behavior of different communities living together in real-world scenarios,” according to the EU. “The ideology allows agents, representing individuals or groups, to be put into a simulated environment where their individual interactions can then be studied more closely.” The project’s FLAME agent technology was developed by the University of Sheffield and has been used in a variety of projects, including the Epitheliome Project for developing various models of skin.

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A coalition of seven academic institutions will use a $12.2 million National Institutes of Health grant to develop VIVOweb, a Facebook-style professional networking system for biomedical researchers across the United States. Participating institutions say VIVOweb will make it easier for scientists to find one another, ultimately enabling them to improve their ongoing studies and create long-term collaborative projects that could result in new discoveries. University of Florida professor Michael Conlon, the principal investigator on the project, says scientists often have difficulty finding each other, and currently the best way to connect with others performing similar research is through lists of publications. Dean Krafft, who is leading the project at Cornell University, says VIVOweb will use the Semantic Web to make information more available to scientists. The public also will be able to access the site, but some information will be available only to scientists. The open source software developed by Cornell for VIVOweb collects the facts a person is looking for and assembles a unique Web page just for that search. Participants expect to have VIVOweb connected across the country within two years, and eventually plan to connect scientists from around the world.

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