One of the greatest challenges facing the United States in research and education is how to fundamentally encourage innovation across all sectors and spawn new solutions to address global challenges. Increasing research evidence and industrial innovations (i.e. mobile computing, social media) confirm that broad interdisciplinary collaborations that include both science and art fields have great potential for spawning creativity and innovation in computer science, engineering and the sciences. An emerging hybrid community of scientists, engineers, artists and designers is producing innovative and entrepreneurial research that advances new knowledge and proposes holistic solutions to societal challenges including health, education and environmental change. Yet, this burgeoning interdisciplinary community continues to face problems in its efforts to self-organize among constraints imposed by academic systems and historical biases; it continues to seek a dynamic and synergizing research and outreach exchange.
Building upon lessons-learned, a new Virtual eXchange to support networks of creativity and innovation amongst Science, Engineering, Art and Design (XSEAD) will be developed. The XSEAD project will address the following urgent needs of the interdisciplinary science-art community: establish a cohesive view of the field and provide a mechanism to attract entrepreneurs and industry; create a venue for multimodal documentation of research outcomes; provide extensive databases of prior and current research; allow rapid dissemination of research outcomes; facilitate forming of collaborations and specialized sub-communities; document and help evolve science-art curricula efforts and evaluation approaches; provide context and support mechanisms for science-arts careers; establish evidence of the societal impact of interdisciplinary science-art integration. The software engineering development components of XSEAD will contribute further knowledge in three technical areas: Content organization (improve the effectiveness of algorithms for dynamic, usage based, organization of large multimedia databases); Recommendation algorithms (promote the use of multi-relational structures for providing effective recommendations); Community dynamics (develop novel algorithms to extract structures that encode meaningful interactions in online social networks).
Broader Impact XSEAD will expose general non-expert audiences to the evolution and potential of collaborative research across science and arts. It will attract the interest of young people searching for careers that combine the rigor of science and engineering with the creativity and reflection of arts and design. It will serve teachers and informal learning communities seeking exemplars for curricular development, active practitioners looking for further institutional opportunities to present and support their ongoing work, academics developing related interdisciplinary efforts and commercial companies seeking cross-trained expertise. XSEAD will enable rapid research exchange and in-depth peer-reviewed scholarship between the worlds of science and art and provide a unique and deeply engaging inroad to a vast and creative repository. XSEAD will help promote new paradigms for developing human centric solutions to complex societal problems (i.e. cost effective health and wellness, globalization and conflict, adaptive K-12 learning, electronic communication and security). These paradigms will combine knowledge across broad and diverse areas of human knowledge.
This project is part of a collaborative, multi-institutional Project led by Thanassis Rikakis at Carnegie Mellon University (NSF Project ID #1141631). Within this larger project, XSEAD (http://xsead.cmu.edu/) was conceived as a community platform where artists, designers, engineers and scientists can collaborate across disciplines and share and discuss and interdisciplinary STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) projects. Rensselaer's contribution for the XSEAD project focused on evaluating, selecting, and implementing tools to support different multimedia formats for the XSEAD portal and to develop and exchange information about interactive systems. These aspects of the XSEAD portal were developed based on two projects with specific XSEAD project sites: 1. Live recreation of the Dan Harpole Cistern (to study immersive sound) This project is dedicated to efforts recreating the Dan Harpole Cistern in Fort Worden, near Seattle, WA. The Cistern with its 45 seconds of reverberation time is an excellent example of an immersive acoustical space. Being the recording venue for a number of Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster's iconic improvisation works, the project is ideal to investigate methods of sharing and exchanging immersive media files over the internet. The project site can be found under this URL: http://xsead.ame.asu.edu/works/63 2. Assistive Technologies for Music and Art (to study the use of telematic and interactive systems) This project was added to the XSEAD portal, after realizing the enormous potential of this project to develop and study the XSEAD platform. The active members of this group to develop assistive technologies are very dedicated, international and consist of participants across various abilities. A number of our affiliates are quadriplegic, and as a consequence of their limited mobility they gained a lot of experience communicating online. The nature of the collaboration is interdisciplinary, with exchange on various levels including technical documents and know-how, software and hardware development, artwork and experience reports. We conducted two one-day International Symposia on Assistive Technologies for Art and Music (www.ISATMA.org) in 2013 and 2014 with additional support from the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, and we started upload and share the media that was captured at these events to serve as basis for a community platform. The work has been featured on the XSEAD portal: http://xsead.ame.asu.edu/works/62 and http://xsead.cmu.edu/sets/33.
