ABOUT

The Observatory of Complex systems was founded by professor Rosario Nunzio Mantegna shortly after he earned his tenured position at the Department of Physics of Palermo University in 1999.

"The only hero able to cut off Medusa's

head is Perseus, who flies with winged

sandals. ..... . To cut off Medusa's head

without being turned to stone, Perseus

supports himself on the very lightest of

things, the winds and the clouds, and

fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed

only by indirect vision, an image caught

in a mirror. I am immediately tempted to

see this myth as an allegory on the poet's

relationship to the world, a lesson in the

method to follow when writing."

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium Vintage Books, Random House, New York 1988 

Rosario Nunzio Mantegna is professor of applied physics at the Department of Physics of Palermo University, member of the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and was honorary prof at University College London, UK. He is recognized as one of the leading pioneers in the field of econophysics. He started to work on the analysis and modeling of social and economic systems with tools and concepts of statistical physics as early as in 1990. He published the first econophysics paper in a physics journal in 1991. He also co-authored the first econophysics paper in Nature in 1995 and in 1999 published the first book on econophysics. Shortly after, he founded the Observatory of Complex Systems within the Department of Physics of Palermo University.

The laboratory is equipped with 11 Workstations for the study of complex systems of economic, social, biological, and socio-technical origin.

It relies on a substantial number of databases, including proprietary and/or strictly confidential:

ECONOMICS

• OCS (financial transaction data for the world's most important stock markets, US equity markets, London, Tokyo, Euronext, Nordic Stock Exchange, etc.

• Rebuild Order Book for the years 2004 to 2006

• SIBE (Sistema de Interconexion Bursatil Electronico) maintained by Bolsas y Mercados Espanoles; Nordic Stock Exchange

• Nordic Center Securities Data (Euroclear) from 1995 to 2016

• DealScan from Thomson Reuters

• NewsScope from Thomson Reuters

SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEMS

• EUROCONTROL 2010, 2011 and 2017 European air traffic database with data from the Demand Data Repository (flight trajectories in the airspace of the European Civil Aviation Conference), "NEVAC files" (specifications of airspace segmentation into spaces, blocks and sectors used for air traffic control).