This CISE special project funds the organization of the CISE Broader Impacts Summit. The goals of the summit include educating the CISE community about the NSF Broader Impacts criterion how to evaluate this criterion as part of a research project. The Summit should provide researchers and educators with the opportunity to forge collaborations and build long-term partnerships that may lead to a wide range of activities with the potential to enhance CISE research projects. The Summit is to be organized by a Steering Committee that represents all CISE divisions and a range of CISE disciplines. The investigators plan to discuss, present, and subsequently develop guidance materials for the CISE computing research community on how to effectively integrate broader impact activities into research projects.
Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this project will arise from the working group discussions at the summit. At the end of the summit, a report is to be developed that synthesizes both current and future ideas in each of the five broader impact categories. This should provide research based methods for CISE investigators to connect their research and broader impacts in innovative ways.
Broader Impacts: The broader impacts of this project will arise from the computing community members, by those to whom they speak about the summit, and by those who access materials created after the summit. The project includes dissemination plans to ensure the efforts from this project have an impact on future NSF projects. The impact on future NSF projects should result in significant broader impacts from CISE research projects across all five broader impact categories.
The goal of the Broader Impacts Summit was to discuss, present, and subsequently develop guidance materials for the NSF CISE research community on how to effectively integrate activities that address the NSF broader impacts review criteria into computer scientists research proposals and subsequent research. To meet that goal, we held a 2-day summit in June, 2010 in the Washington, DC area where (1) several examples of projects with superior broader impacts were presented and (2) working groups met to discuss and document current/future broader impact activities and ways in which infrastructure can be established to make it easier for NSF investigators to improve the broader impacts of their work. Since then, the organizers and other participants of the summit have engaged in outreach and education about the NSF broader impacts criterion, and have also supported outreach activities with direct or indirect broad impact, such as presentations to computer science departments, schools, and wider audiences. The intellectual merit of the project was in the development, analysis, and sharing of ideas and plans for broad impact activities for the community. The importance of valuable outreach activities was emphasized in many of the discussions. We learned that some research inherently has broad impacts, such as work that improves the effectiveness of radiation treatments for cancer, while other projects require separate broad impact activities. One of the broad impacts of the summit was the development of video and written material that can be referenced by other researchers.
