This proposal seeks to further a network of sociotechnical researchers in academia and industry capable of developing innovative applications that leverage next-generation gigabit networking infrastructure. This will foster new multidisciplinary partnerships between the social and computing sciences that will challenge established researchers and develop a new generation of students capable and confident in working in this area. The complex domains addressed by these applications, for example city-wide, media-rich socialinformation spaces for homeless citizens, will necessitate fundamental advances in network science. The emergent co-evolutionary properties will also likely drive research in human-centered computing. The urban government partnerships enable a scale of deployment typically impractical for academic research labs. This will enable at-scale experimentation with a critical mass of users in authentic usage environments, which is essential for advancing our understanding of social computing.
The project proposes a culminating two-day proto-proposal development workshop. The projects that emerge from this workshop will help envision a new future in which high-bandwidth connectivity coupled with a reengineered Internet enables new forms of social interaction and digital citizenship.
The goal of this project was to develop a network of sociotechnical researchers in academia and industry capable of developing innovative applications that leverage next-generation gigabit networking infrastructure. In close collaboration with the US Ignite program and the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) Project Office, this grant provided travel support to two network development events. The first workshop was created and managed by this awardee team. Operationally it was a dedicated track within the 12th GENI engineering conference held November 2-4, 2011 in Kansas City, Missouri. Seventy-six (76) scholars participated in the core workshop and twenty-two (22) teams participated in the research blitz, poster reception, and coaching sessions. The second event was the inaugural US Ignite Application Summit held June 24-26, 2013 in Chicago, IL. This project supported a competitive travel award program to increase the diversity of contributors to the Symposium. Thirty-seven (37) awards were made, resulting in thirty (30) attendees who would not have participated without this travel assistance. Ultimately the grant was successful in fostering interest in next generation networking application development, developing new project teams, and maturing those teams through to their first funded project. This helped lay the foundation for the current US Ignite program and the Mozilla Ignite partnership.
