The proposed project is to convene a workshop for NSF Cyber Enabled Discoveries and Innovations(CDI) Initiative. The workshop will be held at The Westin Hotel, located in downtown Seattle, WA, on June 14, 2008, from 8:00 am to 3:30 pm. The objective of the workshop is two fold. First, the workshop is to introduce the CDI initiative to the participants using a format of invited presentations, breakout discussions, and a question and answer session. Through the interactive workshop, potential principal investigators will have a deeper understanding of the scope and purpose of the CDI initiative. The second objective is to obtain feedback from workshop participants regarding how researchers from diverse backgrounds can partner to better respond to the CDI initiative.
The seminar portion of the workshop will consist of 3 invited presentations. The invited speakers are John White - USTAR professor of neurophysiology at Univ. Utah, Bradford Hawkins, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Univ. California Irvine, and Michael Glantz, social scientist with expertise in climate - society interactions at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. These three speakers are complementary to the disciplines that attend the ACC. The number of participants is estimated to be no more than 40. Professor Karlene A. Hoo of Texas Tech University will chair the workshop and Professors Jay Farrell and John Chiasson will serve as advisors to the Chair for the workshop and lead the breakout discussion sessions. The breakout sessions will report back on questions such as "what application problems will benefit the CDI initiative" and how does a topic fit with the concept of computational thinking. Discussions resulting from the breakout sessions will be reported at the workshop and in a report to NSF. Finally, there will be an NSF question and answer session.
Intellectual Merit The workshop offers a premier opportunity for the participants that attend ACC and others who choose to attend the workshop to find out about new research developments in computational thinking and transformative thinking in other disciplines. The workshop also offers a forum for the participants to interact and conceive new research directions and partnerships that create revolutionary science and engineering that are value adding to the CDI initiative.
Broader Impact The workshop provides the participants with opportunities to interact with researchers of different backgrounds to foster computational thinking and promote brainstorming of research ideas that will be responsive to the CDI initiative. The workshop also allows participants to cogitate on critical educational issues that will be needed to complement the transformative research directions. The workshop will make every effort to include participation of new researchers (students and post doctoral associates) and underrepresented groups of researchers to enhance diversity. Dissemination of the workshop results using the internet will permit sharing the results with the public.
