“We have become increasingly aware that our businesses and societies are embedded in complex systems – the economic system, the climate system, and so on – which are globally linked and may be susceptible to sudden change. Forecasting tools developed for the demands of classical astronomy...

Orrell and McSharry, authors of A Systems Approach to Forecasting (issue 14 of Foresight) reply to commentaries by Roy Batchelor, and Paul Goodwin and Robert Fildes. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2009

Huge volumes of data now flow from on-line sources — the internet, mobile telephony, weather sensors, and much more. With this data surge, there is an emerging need for computational algorithms to instantly process data streams, sift through large volumes of information, and extract and...