Curriculum Vitae

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Name: Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Dirk Helbing

Current position: Professor of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation at ETH Zurich

Nationality: German

Parents: Ingeborg and Horst-Hartwig Helbing

Professional preparation:

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Honors

• 1992: Two research prizes for PhD Thesis
• 1996: Heisenberg postdoc scholarship by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
• 2000: Managing Director of Institute of Transport & Economics, Dresden University of Technology
• 2005: Member of External Faculty of Collegium Budapest - Institute for Advanced Study
• 2008: Elected member of the German Academy of Sciences "Leopoldina"
• 2012: Golden Idea Ward by IDEE-SUISSE® – Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Ideen- und Innovationsmanagement for the project: «Self-Controlling Traffic Lights»

Visiting scientist:

• August / September 2010:Harvard University
  
• October / November 2010: University of Oxford, Nuffield College
  

Research activities include:

• behavioral models, decision and game theory
• multi-agent simulation of socio-economic and biophysical systems
• stochastic processes and Monte-Carlo simulations
• self-organization and pattern formation phenomena in space and time
• evacuation, disaster spreading and response management
• vehicle and pedestrian traffic including panic
• optimization of transport and production systems
• dynamics of supply networks and business cycles

Past teaching activities include graduate courses in transport planning, traffic modeling and simulation, operations research, econometrics and multivariate statistics, time series analysis, and stochastic modeling of transport phenomena. Current research and teaching is performed in Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation. Courses include "Human Coordination in Space and Time", "Mathematical Sociology, Agent-Based Modeling and Artificial Societies", "From Crowds to Crises", and "Modeling Socio-Economic Systems and Crises".

Past administrative responsibilities include appointment as director of the Institute for Transport and Economics, membership in the council, in the Ph.D. committee and in the strategy commission of the Faculty of Traffic and Transportation Sciences at TU Dresden, leadership of the faculty's working group for public relations, membership in boards of EXYSTENCE, GIACS, and ONCE-CS, which are EU programs in complexity science, activity as a "super-referee" (Fachkollegiat) for the German Research Foundation (DFG), representation of the "Physics of Socio-Economic Systems" Division (Φ·SOE) of the German Physical Society (DPG) and of the European research program COST P10: Physics of Risk, and member of the award committee of the international Young Scientist Award in Socio- and Econophysics, co-founder and vice-chairman of the ETH Risk Center.

Current administrative responsibilities: Head of the "Physics of Socio-Economic Systems" Division (Φ·SOE) of the German Physical Society (DPG). Member of the ETH Risk Center. Board member of the Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division of the European Physical Society (EPS). Scientific coordinator of the FuturICT flagship project.

Activities as principal investigator in about 20 research projects so far, sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), European Union (EU) and European Research Foundation (ESF), Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT), Siemens AG, Volkswagen AG, SCA Packaging Ltd. and various industrial partners such as the Volkswagen AG, SCA Packaging, Infineon Technologies, the PTV AG, the Bosch AG, the Siemens AG, and other companies.

Current Sponsored Research Projects at ETH Zurich:

• Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economics Systems (ETH Zurich and ETH Foundation)
• QLectives - Socially Intelligent Systems for Quality Collectives (EU)

Past Major Research Projects, some of which are still running in Dresden:

• SANDY - Applications of Non-Linear Dynamics to Traffic Systems (BMBF/Siemens)
• Collective Phenomena in Road Traffic (DFG)
• VASIS - Model-Based Estimation of Traffic States Using Different Data Sources (ddg Company for Traffic Data)
• Traffic Jam Avoidance by Intelligent Vehicle Behavior (Volkswagen)
• INVENT - Intelligent Traffic and User-Friendly Technology (BMBF/Volkswagen)
• Optimization of Production Processes (SCA Packaging)
• Disaster and Evacuation Scenarios (DFG)
• Adaptive Signal Control (DFG)
• MMCOMNET - Measuring and Modeling Complex Networks Across Domains (EU)
• IRRIIS - Integrated Risk Reduction in Information Infrastructure Systems (EU)
• Many-Particle Concepts for the Treatment of Complex Material Flows in Production Systems and Logistics (DFG)
• Influence of Drivers above 65 on the Traffic Flow (Volkswagen)
• Complex Self-Organizing Networks of Interacting Machines (Volkswagen Foundation)
• BioLogistics: From Bio-Inspired Engineering of Complex Logistic Systems to NanoLogistics (Daimler Benz Foundation)
• Computer Simulation and Management of Pedestrian Flows (DFG)
• Computer Simulation and Management of Pedestrian Flows (DFG)
• Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economics Systems (ETH Zurich and ETH Foundation)
• Visioneer – Envisioning a Socio-Economic Knowledge Collider: From Computational Social Science to Social Computing

Professional Activities and Committees

• Elected member of the German Academy of Sciences "Leopoldina", the European Academy of Sociology (EAS), chair of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DFG), member of the Section "Modeling and Simulation" of the German Sociological Society (DGS), the Complex Systems Society (CSS), the European Physical Society (EPS), the American Physical Society (APS), the scientific advisory board of German Logistics Association (BVL), the Friedrich List Forum and the Friends of Dresden University of Technology, and of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems.
• Associate editor of Transportation Science. Member of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination (JEIC),  Networks and Heterogeneous Media (NHM), Econophysics Forum, Transportation Research B.
• Reviewer for about 15 different journals in various fields: Nature, PNAS, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, major transportation journals, Physical Review Letters, Europhysics Letters, Physical Review E, Physica A, International Journal of Modern Physics C, European Journal of Physics B, Transport Theory and Statistical Physics, and others.
• Proposal reviewer for 5 national or international science foundations, including the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• Conference chair of the international conference on "Traffic and Granular Flow '99: Social, Traffic, and Granular Dynamics". International Workshop on the "Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media" (2006), "European Conference on Complex Systems 2007 (ECCS'07)", "Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences" (2008) and "Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems" (2009), Co-chair or member of the steering committee of the interdisciplinary workshop on Traffic Planning and Simulation, international workshop on "Economic Dynamics from the Physics Point of View", 18th Dresden Conference on Traffic and Transportation Sciences (2001), international conference Dynamic Days 2001, 19th Dresden Conference on Traffic and Transportation Sciences (2003), EU Thematic Institute "From Many-Particle Physics to Multi-Agent Systems" (2004), EU Thematic Institute "Information and Material Flows in Complex Networks" (2005).
• Author of over 200 publications, among them about 150 articles in refereed journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS, Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Decision Theory, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Behavioral Science, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS One, Physical Review Letters, Transportation Research B and C, Transportation Science, IEEEEnvironment and Planning B. In addition, 3 monographs and several review articles. More than 300 talks, about half of them invited talks at various international conferences. More than 300 reports in newspapers, on the radio or on TV.