The European  FUPOL project which includes the participation of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) is being carried out by an international consortium  of seventeen partners from Europe and China, financed by the European Commission to the tune of €9.1m, that  will be developing advanced artificial intelligence (AI)  tools to collect, analyse and interpret automatically the opinions expressed by users through the internet with the aim of assessing politicians in the design and implementation of social policies.

The seventeen partners are Cellent AG    Xerox SAS   Fraunhofer IGD  City of Zagreb   Yantai IIC BIT   ZIH   SSEI   UAB  Comune di Prato  EASY Connects (UK)  Active Solution   Interfusion Ltd Pegeia Municipality  Qualysoft GmbH  PIN SCRL  Romanian American University

Initially the project will focus on assessing urban policies and decision-making processes of local authorities. The technologies and innovations developed however will be generic and available for all political levels and areas.

The system will be able automatically to collect, analyse and interpret the opinions expressed by internet users thanks to tools which classify the large amount of information generated by social networks.

The aim is to make it easier for governing bodies to comprehend the needs of its citizens and improve social policies. Using simulation models, the programme eventually will be capable of predicting benefits and shortcomings of policies during the design phase.



UAB researchers participating in the project, led by Miguel Mújica Mota (left)  and Miguel Ángel Piera from the Department of Telecommunications and Systems Engineering, will be in charge of developing social behaviour simulation models.At international level, the project is coordinated by Peter Sonntagbauer, (right) researcher at Cellent AG (AT), Austrian subsidiary of a multinational corporation with headquarters in Germany. 



According to UAB researcher Miguel Mújica. "FUPOL aims to provide a completely new approach to traditional politics. The processing of information made available by social networks will change the way in which politicians communicate with the people and their decision-making processes. The project will contribute to the sustainable development of cities and will lower the barrier between citizens and politicians."



The project already has generated a large amount of interest, even outside the European Union. One of the project partners is the city of Yantai (left) , in the Shandong Province of the People's Republic of China, while some of the members of "Major Cities of Europe" (MCE) have been chosen as pilot cities.

The working plan includes five field research projects in China, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy and the United Kingdom, which will focus on the political areas of urban planning, land use, sustainable development, migration and urban segregation.

FUPOL expected specific outcomes:

•  Preparation of a new Governance Model
  
A new governance model to engage all stakeholders in the whole policy design lifecycle starting from the early automatic detection of citizens needs. The new governance model builds on Web 2.0 as well as existing know-how and government data available to create better policies and decisions based on the citizens’ expectations.

• Preparation of a comprehensive Urban Policy Knowledge Database
  
The implementation of the governance model will be facilitated by an Urban Policy
  Knowledge Database based on scientific research of best practices recommendations, generic models and selected simulations.   This  is a conceptual framework and methodology for defining and modelling policies in ICT tools with specific recommendations and generic causal models. It will also include the relevant laws to policy domains. In order  to facilitate broad based acceptance and application a  repository of generic policy models for typical topics in cities, municipalities and urban regions based on cognitive models, causal models specified in Coloured Petri Net Formalism and agent behaviour will be build.

• Preparation of an innovative cloud computing based ICT Framework 

  The FUPOL solution will be based on cloud computing. This is a key success factor for large scale take-up and acceptance. During the pilot phase II and after the solution it will be accessible to all interested parties in Europe as a web service.  The generic Cloud computing based ICT framework to support the whole policy design lifecycle will consist of:

• Software simulation components to simulate real-life with agent based models
   A core platform, which provides: a database to store statistical data and a knowledge base: a database to store stakeholder collaboration data (feedback, ...): a data import and feed facilities to import available public data: a generic data import and export facilities to ensure stakeholder multichannel stakeholder collaboration and an advanced visualization facility for the interaction with the platform features, and the simulation results.

• Prepare Multilingual Training and accompanying material 
  
In order to explain the practical application of ICT tools and policy modelling in cities, municipalities and urban regions multilingual multimedia training material will be developed. This is considered crucial for the overall success of the project. The training material will also include Chinese Mandarin.

• Piloting and evaluation of the FUPOL approach in Europe and China
  
The work plan includes five demonstrators. They are in China, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy and the UK. The pilots already reflect the interest beyond the European Union. The pilots have well defined policy areas, such as urban planning, land use and sustainable development, migration and urban segregation.
   
•  Large scale dissemination of the result
  Special attention will be given to large scale dissemination of the project results through the clusters of European cities. 

The dissemination will be implemented in two major campaigns:

• Create Awareness - The objective is to make the project well known to governments across Europe and encourage political entities. The objective will be met through conferences and workshops across Europe, articles and publications.
•  Disseminate project results – The objective builds on experiences of the awareness in the first phase eg. classification of events, identified channels and personal contacts. The main difference is that in phase 2 there is marketable content to be disseminated to a targeted audience.

•  Design and initiation of a sustainable exploitation
  The objective refers to the elaboration of a sustainability strategy and initiation of steps to ensure further exploit the results (4th project year). As one principle FUPOL will follow open source license principles as much as possible to ensure broad based exploitation, adoption and use of results.

Since the project has a strong ICT industry involvement it will encourage the FUPOL best practice exchange between ICT Industry and the EU Public Sector.

12 PROJECT LINKS
 Cockpit aims to define a new Governance model which actively engages and empowers citizens in Public Service delivery decision making process. Cockpit will combine the research areas of citizens’ opinion mining in the context of Web 2.0, enhance Service Science Management Engineering in the context of the public sector and encourage deliberative engagement of citizens for forming informed judgments on public services delivery.

CROSSROAD
 Participative Roadmap for ICT Research in Electronic Governance and Policy Modelling Governments struggle to regulate an increasingly interdependent and complex world, as the financial crisis has shown. At the same time, citizens are becoming more vocal in monitoring and influencing policy decisions. Future scenarios are likely to show greater complexity and citizens' involvement.

e-CODEX 
The goal of the e-CODEX project is to improve cross-border citizen and business access of to legal means in Europe and improve the interoperability between legal authorities within the EU. Use of ICT will make judicial procedures more transparent, efficient and economic. It will help citizens, companies, administrations, and legal practitioners to get facilitated access to justice. Not only smoother access to information but also the ability to process cross-border cases efficiently.

NET-EUCEN
 project will create, animate and manage a working network of stakeholders in the Governance and Policy Modelling domains belonging to all the European countries and with relevant knowledge of massive on-line service fruition and eInclusion policies and interests, thus covering the whole supply chain of the Service for Users (S4U).


OCOPOMO project will create an ICT-based environment integrating lessons and practical techniques from complexity science, agent based social simulation, foresight scenario analysis and stakeholder participation in order to formulate and monitor social policies to be adopted at several levels


Padgets
  aims at bringing together two well established domains, the mashup architectural approach of web 2.0 for creating web applications (gadgets) and the methodology of system dynamics in analyzing complex system behaviour. The objective is to design, develop and deploy a prototype toolset that will allow policy makers to graphically create web applications that will be deployed in the environment of underlying knowledge in Web 2.0 media.

Policy Impact
 will conduct original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. These models will be used to develop and evaluate innovative prototype tools for supporting open, inclusive and transparent deliberations about public policy.

Positive Spaces
 aims to provide tools that will allow the exploitation of virtual worlds for assessing public reaction, and build a service oriented platform that will support these tools by exploiting virtual worlds as knowledge containers, and by allowing added value services to be incorporated.

RURAL INCLUSION focuses on the offer of e-government services to regional enterprises in the scope of reducing/simplifying interaction with public organizations. It spans a period of 36 months, (June 2009-May 2012), and is financed by the European Commission Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP.)


SYNC-3
  focuses in the commentaries of blog users on issues that are presented in the news media (blogosphere content). Such content is of significant importance for the collective formation of public opinion. However, blogs have yet to take place as a primary source of information. Unlike community news portals, blogosphere is totally unstructured. This constitutes the main reason the blogosphere cannot consistently reach larger audiences. SYNC3 adopts the “structure” concept as a key point to provide its contribution to the business and research communities.


UbiPOL aims to provide context aware knowledge provision with regard to policy making. That is citizens using UbiPOL will be able to identify any relevant policies and other citizen's opinion whenever they want wherever they are according to their as-usual life pattern. With the platform, citizens are expected to be more widely aware of any relevant policies and PMPs for involvement during their as-usual life therefore improved engagement and empowerment.

WEGOV project will develop a toolset that allows full advantage to be taken of a wide range of existing and well established social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, WordPress etc.) to engage citizens in two-way dialogs as part of governance and policymaking processes. The tools will make it possible to detect, track and mine opinions and discussions on policy oriented topics.


ANTS DON'T BOTHER WITH PROJECTS
Many political systems use regulations and legislation to curb resource over exploitation. In a new study  scientists find that ant colonies can ‘benefit’ from an external ‘parasite’ which curbs resource over-exploitation by resident queens, resulting in increased production of female offspring with queen potential. The increased number of ‘potential new queens’ implies a boost to colony efficiency and ‘fitness’ (or health).

It builds  on six years of research carried out by a team from the University of Würzburg, Germany, the UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology at the University of Oxford, UK, Rothamsted Research, UK, University of Southampton, UK and Limerick University in Ireland.

The team first studied colonies of the ant Formica lemani (above right) concluding that ant colonies infestedwith larva of the predatory parasitic hoverfly Microdon mutabilis  (left) produced more new queens than uninfected colonies. These results were published in Ecology Letters in 2006.

Next stage was to develop a theoretical model to simulate the probable mechanisms behind the increased production of potential new queens. For potential new queens to develop successfully they need a specific level of resource. With many other worker larvae to feed food resources can be limited.

Results from the 2006 study showed that the presence of the parasitic hoverfly reduces ant larvae numbers, increasing  share of food available for each surviving larva including potential new queens.

Predictions from the model created for the latest study indicate that predation on the young ant brood by  hoverfly could be responsible for an increase in the production of new queens, achieved through a re-routing of food resources.
Paper co-author Dr Karsten Schönrogge, ecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, said, “Theallocation of food resources within an ant colony has interesting parallels in the way we manage our society and environment in a sustainable manner.

"It is easy to visualise the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ scenario unfolding within uninfected ant colonies, where a shared and limited resource is depleted through unregulated access resulting in over-exploitation to the detriment of society.”

In an infected colony thehoverfly ‘parasite’ presence has a negative effect on total larva numbers, but  ‘benefits’ the colony as a whole with the net effect being a greater number of new potential queens than in a non-infected colony.

The model also predicts that the increase occurs only at the beginning of a Microdon infection period, and a re-analysis of the original results showed that this prediction is indeed supported by real world observations. 

Dr Schönrogge added, “Ant foraging behaviour has previously been modelled by computer scientists and ecologists, resulting in the ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO), a major advance in the computing sector. Ants are one of the most successful animal groups on the planet and the next questions for ecologists and political theorists is how resource management within ant colonies might affect interactions with surrounding related or unrelated competing colonies and how that would be mirrored in human societies.”

The politics of urban planning, land use, sustainable development, migration and urban segregation