EPIC: Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure A collaboration led by Boston University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison The goal of Engaging People In Cyberinfrastructure (EPIC) is to build human capacity by creating awareness of the opportunities afforded through cyberinfrastruture (CI) and by educating and training a diverse group of people in all stages of life from K-12 to professional practice to fully participate in the CI community as developers, users, and leaders. Strategies designed to meet this goal include:
1. Providing an integrated spectrum of computational science education and training in the use of tools and resources, for science and math education at all levels, 2. Enabling access to advanced technologies and tools in education and outreach, 3. Ensuring diversity by both supporting specific access and inclusion projects and infusing every aspect of EPIC with diversity, access, and inclusion, and 4. Establishing a large energized community of educators, students, researchers, and citizens engaged in developing and using cyberinfrastructure.
An extensive cohort of partners will implement the following activities that support these strategies: workshops and meetings; "train the trainers" activities; professional development, mentoring, and youth programs; diversity and accessibility programs; development of learning materials, software, and simulation tools, and online dissemination of materials, tools, resources, guides, reports and best practices.
Intellectual Merit: EPIC will construct a human capacity building infrastructure that extends the CI community to include a much larger number of talented and diverse people as primary beneficiaries of CI. EPIC seeks to demonstrate the effects of using the proven community building practices of the successful Education, Outreach and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (www.eot.org) program and extending these practices to engage larger, more diverse communities. EPIC will be independently evaluated to document the keys to success and to lay the foundation for major advances in scale-up and sustained systemic change.
Broader Impact: The nature of CI as an agency-wide initiative makes community building essential to its success. By explicitly introducing our community building activity within CI initiatives, NSF has a natural pathway to inclusive behavior and processes. EPIC's focus on diversity will ensure that CI fully engages under-served populations, and accelerates the preparation of America's workforce for a global digital society. Demonstration and documentation of EPIC's practices will serve as a roadmap to NSF and other federal agencies. The project results will lay the foundation for future years as CI accelerates its impact upon every field of science and engineering.
