Dr Pablo Mateos

ENFOLD: Explaining, modelliNg, and FOrecasting gLobal Dynamics

Pablo Mateos participates in a successful CASA-led £2.9 million bid to EPSRC involving seven UCL departments and ten academics.

ENFOLD is a multidisplinary five year modelling project funded by EPSRC (£2.9 million FEC) spanning across seven UCL departments. It will develop new forms of complexity science which address the most difficult of human problems: those that involve global change where there is no organised constituency and whose agencies are largely regarded as being ineffective. ENFOLD will argue that global systems tend to be treated in isolation from one another and that the unexpected dynamics that characterises their behaviour is due to their coupling and integration that is all too often ignored. To demonstrate these dynamics and to develop appropriate policy responses, it will study four related global systems: trade, migration, security and development aid. It will develop integrated and coupled models whose dynamics can be described in the not so conventional language of complexity theory: chaos, turbulence, bifurcations, catastrophes, and phase transition. The programme will apply spatial interaction models to trade and migration, reaction diffusion to conflicts and terrorism, and network models to international trade, migration and crime. These models will be extended to incorporate the generation of qualitative new events such as the emergence of new entities e.g. countries, coupling them together in diverse ways. We will ultimately develop a generic framework for a coupled global dynamics that spans many spatial and temporal scales and pertains to different systems whose behaviours can be simulated both quantitatively and qualitatively. Various models will be developed which incorporate all these ideas into a global intelligence system to inform global policy makers about future events. Several UK government departments as well as global businesses are partners in this project.

The project is led by Sir Alan Wilson at CASA. Dr. Pablo Mateos is one of the co-investigators and will lead the migration strand of the project, based at the Migration Research Unit. Professor John Salt will be an adviser to the project.

• Professor Sir Alan Wilson FBA, FRS (CASA), PI
• Professor Mike Batty CBE, FBA, FRS (CASA)
• Professor Frank Smith FRS (Mathematics)
• Professor Stephen Bishop (Mathematics)
• Dr Francesca Medda (Transport Studies)
• Dr Pablo Mateos (Geography)
• Dr Alex Braithwaite (Political Science)
• Dr Alastair Turner (Political Science)
• Dr Shane Johnson (Jill Dando Institute)
• Dr Sean Hanna (Bartlett School)

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