The proposal is to request funds for a small invitation only workshop comprising principally of members of the Software Taskforce and invitees.
Intellectual Merit
This taskforce constituted as a subcommittee of the ACCI is focused on examining issues in Software Infrastructure. The charter for this task force is to form recommendations on how best to fulfill the NSF mission and help meet the demand for ubiquitous, reliable, and easily accessible software to support science and engineering research needs. Software infrastructure has evolved organically and inconsistently, with its development and adoption being driven by patchwork funding structures and sporadic application-specific resource availability.
At this time, a draft report has been developed with communication via telecons and emails. To allow for a more effective and efficient discussion about the report details, it is important to have a face-to-face meeting whereby discussions can occur over hours instead of minutes. The goal of this meeting is to go through the details of the report such that a refined early report can be disseminated to the broad community for buy-in and feedback.
The meeting outcome will consist of a refined report that will be ready for dissemination to the broad community.
The initial funding for this project was used to support a face-to-face meeting of the Software Task Force, which was convened by the Advisory Committee of the Office of Cyberinfrastructor in 2009. The face-to-face meeting took place in January 2010. The meeting was very productive and helped to move forward the completion of the Task Force Report. In particular, the meeting provided excellent discussions that led to the major recommendations in the report. The final report was published in June 2011 and is now available on the NSF website. The Task Force had four major recommendation, of which one has resulted in the new Software Infrastructure program at NSF. We consider this a major outcome of the Task Force. During the time period of 1/1/2012 through 12/31/2012, the remainder of the funding from this grant was used to for a workshop, called Diversity as an Innovation Resource (DIR), which was focused on Middle School Math Education Delivery Using Mobile Devices for Students in Under-served Communities. This was approved by the NSF program director, since the Task Force had completed its goals. The Workshop was held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in June 2012. The workshop included teachers, researchers, principals, and practioners in ethnomathematics. The major outcome from the workshop was a list of projects focused on middle school math that have a cultural component and can be implemented as mobile applications. These applications have been used in some senior design courses. The goal is to use these project in some middle schools to better engage the students with learning math.
