Research to understand the full range of humanitarian service systems for today and tomorrow requires diverse teams of researchers who work across disciplines as well as with professionals to develop and apply new interdisciplinary knowledge, methods and strategies. We need engineers who can design not only for efficiency or cost-benefit ratios, but for the full ranges of social, behavioral, political, cultural and economic issues impacting humanitarian service activities. We need social scientists who can integrate their field and assessment methods with the quantitative modeling and simulation methods of the engineering community. In response to this challenge, a growing community of scientists, engineers, communications experts, and humanitarian practitioners has been exploring innovative approaches to disaster management. At a recent NSF workshop on this subject, this evolving, highly interdisciplinary effort was called Humanitarian Service Science and Engineering (HSSE). HSSE is an emerging frontier in engineering research that explores how our ability to effectively design, evaluate, and predict the behavior of service systems can be extended into non-profit areas and situations that are invariably chaotic, disrupted, and complicated by complex parameters and goals. This award supports an NSF-sponsored workshop that brings together leaders from the numerous relevant research disciplines that are contributing to the evolving HSSE field, as well as humanitarian professionals involved in developing new methods and strategies for delivering humanitarian service. We will use this workshop to (1) define and extend the HSSE community, (2) define and extend HSSE issues and methodologies, and (3) articulate a common agenda for the emerging research frontier of Humanitarian Service Science and Engineering. This workshop will be a key step towards mobilizing a cutting-edge, cross-disciplinary research community prepared to collaborate in creative ways on the unique and complex issues of service science and engineering. This will not only help address humanitarian needs, but will also expand our basic understanding of service science.
