Welcome to the 4th European Conference on Complex Systems

Since June 1st, 2007, Dirk Helbing is Professor of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation at ETH Zurich. Before, he worked as Managing Director of the Institute for Transport & Economics at Dresden University of Technology, where he was appointed full professor in 2000. Having studied Physics and Mathematics in Göttingen, his master thesis dealt with the nonlinear modelling and multi-agent simulation of observed self-organization phenomena in pedestrian crowds. Two years later, he finished his Ph.D. at Stuttgart University on modelling social interaction processes by means of game-theoretical approaches, stochastic methods and complex systems theory, which was awarded two research prizes. After having completed his habilitation on traffic dynamics and optimization in 1996, he received a Heisenberg scholarship. Both theses were printed by international publishers. Apart from this, Helbing has (co-)organized several international conferences and (co-)edited proceedings or special issues on material flows in networks and cooperative dynamics in socio-economic and traffic systems. He has given 250 talks and published more than 200 papers, including several contributions to journals like Nature, Science, or PNAS, which were discussed by the public media (newspapers, radio, and TV) more than 200 times. He collaborates closely with international scientists. For example, he worked at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, at Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley, at INRETS in Paris and the Collegium Budapest - Institute for Advanced Study in Hungary, where he is now a member of the external faculty.