The Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) vision is to improve the well-being and prosperity of diverse communities by connecting residents to each other and their environments through smart technologies. Achieving this vision will require solving complex and interlocking physical, social, behavioral, economic, and infrastructure challenges, which will only be possible through close engagement with community stakeholders to understand the community needs and develop actionable solutions. This proposal is for the 2019 S&CC Program Principal Investigator (PI) meeting. The meeting will allow PIs from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) S&CC Program and graduate students spanning multiple technological and social disciplines to interact with Program Directors, community partners and stakeholders, and representatives from other Federal Agencies in order to disseminate project objectives and accomplishments and foster new and emerging collaborations. This will be the second S&CC PI Meeting, and will include grantees from both the 2017 and 2018 S&CC solicitation.
Planned sessions of the PI meeting will address cross-cutting themes of S&CC, including improving outcomes in under-served communities and sustaining S&CC technologies beyond the development and prototyping stages. These discussions will be enhanced through networking activities for NSF PIs and participating community partners. In addition, the S&CC PI meeting will be held in conjunction with the Smart Cities Connect annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. The S&CC Connect meeting is a multi-day meeting that brings together city and municipality leaders who are working on S&CC problems and are interested in forming partnerships with others including academic researchers. An important aspect of the meeting is an opportunity for networking between the S&CC PI community and civic leaders attending the broader Connect meeting.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
