Accelerating scientific discovery by formulating grand scientific challenges

One important question for science and society is how to best promote scientific progress. Inspired by the great success of Hilbert’s famous set of problems, the FuturICT project tries to stimulate and focus the efforts of many scientists by formulating Grand Challenges, i.e. a set of fundamental, relevant and hardly solvable scientific questions.


Introduction
When David Hilbert formulated Grand Challenges in mathematics about a century ago [1], this strongly promoted the development of modern mathematics, even though some findings were quite different from what was expected (the famous incompleteness theorem by Kurt Gödel demonstrates this well). To stimulate scientific progress, it has therefore been proposed to formulate 'Hilbert problems' also in other research areas [2][3][4][5]. Of course, many Grand Challenges in social and economic sciences will not have an exact mathematical answer. Moreover, some problems may not have a solution at all, but it could still be possible to reach significant improvements. Despite the considerable differences between mathematical and real-world problems, a crucial part of performing science is to identify good questions. Without this foundational step, scientific discovery is likely to be erratic. Good questions can guide the way towards new discoveries. Once a question is formulated, it is often just a matter of time, until progress is made.
To stimulate this progress, outstanding scientific publications addressing challenges such as the ones listed below should be rewarded by prestigious research prizes, stipends, or grants, even when the answers are only steps forward rather than a complete solution. These rewards should be distributed by a high-level international, multi-disciplinary jury (science board) according to the progress made. But it is even more important that the academic system also provides incentives for identifying good questions and sharing them with others. Currently, the publication of open research challenges or a list of such challenges is rarely found in conventional peer-reviewed journals. This must be changed. Therefore, over the time period of its implementation, the FuturICT project [6] intends to create an open platform, where Grand Challenges can be publicly posted by scientists, citizens or institutions. FuturICT's envisaged crowd funding platform shall help to match questions, funding and ideas. a e-mail: dhelbing@ethz.ch Sponsors (such as companies, individuals, funding agencies, or non-profit organizations) could then provide a budget for the solution of these questions. Such problems, when attached with money, will attract the interest of bright minds. The financial rewards would allow them to get money for future research.
According to this new funding principle, money will be provided for the best solutions, not for proposals or promises. A positive side effect would be that the level of proposal writing and reporting could be considerably reduced, which currently impairs scientific productivity a lot. This novel approach of organizing and supporting science could establish a new research and innovation paradigm (see Refs. [2,7] for a more detailed discussion).
We now turn to the central theme of this paper, namely the formulation of a set of challenging scientific questions (see also Refs. [3][4][5]). Some of the problems have certainly been around for quite a while, but still require attention and a federated effort.
1 Socio-economic real-world challenges 1. How to reach a balance of power in a multi-polar world (between different countries and economic centers, between the worlds of business and politics, between individual and collective rights)? 2. How to promote security and peace (e.g. avoid organized crime, terrorism, social unrest)? 3. What are the contributing factors and dynamics of conflict? How to avoid, overcome or moderate conflict, or turn it into a creative force? How to facilitate a peaceful interaction of people with incompatible values and diverse cultural backgrounds? 4. What contributes to the spreading of crime and corruption, and how to counteract it? 5. What is the origin of social and economic inequality? How can poverty and precarious living conditions be reduced? How much inequality is beneficial for socioeconomic progress, and how can it be stabilized? 6. How to increase the quality of life, satisfaction, and well-being of people? How to reduce suicide rates? 7. How to promote public health (increase food safety; reduce the spreading of epidemics, obesity, smoking, or unhealthy diets...)?
2 Measurement and methodological issues How to solve the too big to fail problem? 3. How to manage inefficient and imperfect markets? How to reduce the manipulation of market prices (e.g. through artificial shortage)? 4. What is the impact of financial innovations on the stability of the economic system and what does it depend on? Can low-latency/high-frequency trading destabilize financial markets? What monetary policies can stop financial contagion and overcome financial crises? 5. How to establish a more efficient and robust exchange of value(s) between agents, considering mechanisms like trust, reputation, and norms? How to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) financial system for payment and lending? How to overcome the limitations of one-dimensional money and create multi-dimensional incentive systems? 6. How to design auctioning mechanisms for energy markets that can handle decentralized energy production without large price fluctuations and cannot systematically be exploited (i.e. which are fair to everyone)? 7. How to balance economic and social conflicts of interest?
10 Institutions and integrative systems design 1. In what ways do decision-making rules determine the outcome and behavior of social systems? How to organize decision-making and delegate power in a way that maximizes the satisfaction of people? How to take wise collective decisions that avoid herding effects, overconfidence, and a suppression of minorities? 2. How do structures, hierarchies, and institutions emerge and what are the properties associated with them? How to design social, economic, and political institutions in a way that allows us to address social problems more successfully? How to understand the interaction of people with institutions and the interaction between institutions? 3. How do bottom-up and top-down processes of social regulation interact? How to reach the best combination of top-down (centralized, global) and bottom-up (decentralized, local) decisions? 4. How to develop mechanisms and institutional settings (such as regulatory and legal frameworks), which establish resilient social, economic and political systems that seamlessly adapt to global change? How to avoid over-regulation and corruption, etc.?

Conclusions
Of course, one cannot expect that the FuturICT project can solve the above questions over a 10 years time period. However, one can hope that the above list of Grand Challenges will stimulate the research of many scientists in different disciplines all over the world and that this will accelerate the generation of knowledge on important problems, which deserve more attention and support. Note that a more precise specification of the above problems is part of the scientific challenge, because the solution is often not a mathematical proof, but rather a matter of empirical or experimental evidence, and may depend on the value system or priorities. If researchers develop different perspective on the same problem, this can be very fruitful.