1160979 George Mason University; Chaowei Yang 1160990 Harvard University; Peter Bol 1160959 University of California-Santa Barbara; Keith Clarke
George Mason University (GMU), Harvard University (HU), and the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara (UCSB) will conduct a planning meeting with industry, university, government agencies, and associations to a) determine the feasibility and viability of developing a center for spatiotemporal thinking and computing, and b) plan the research agenda for the proposed center.
The proposal seeks to establish an I/UCRC for spatiotemporal thinking and computing as a collaboration platform among universities, industry, government agencies, and other organizations to enable research and education to 1) improve the US geospatial research infrastructure base; 2) enhance the intellectual capacity within the future engineering and science workforce; and 3) establish the US leadership in spatiotemporal thinking and computing. The proposed center will be established based upon the previous successes at each of the three sites including: a) the Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing (CISC) at GMU for spatiotemporal computing/software development; b) the Center for Spatial Studies (CSS) at UCSB for spatial thinking and analyses; and c) the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) at Harvard for spatiotemporal applications.
The Planning Meeting will solicit input from potential Center members and develop projects and priorities for research. There are existing programs at the three campuses with potential overlap, but the mission of the new Center would be to integrate these technologies into a comprehensive spatiotemporal theory and applications. Research results and success stories will be disseminated through publications in relevant spatiotemporal venues as well as among the center member sites for adoption and outreach. The PIs plan to include leading relevant professional organizations to help broadcast the research results and recruit new members through their organizational channels. The PIs also intend to collaborate with complementary I/UCRCs to broaden the impact of the proposed center's research results.
This planning project successfully facilitated the establishment of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) for spatiotemporal thinking, computing and applications (a.k.a NSF spatiotemporal innovation center, www.stcenter.net). The center planning meeting was successfully held on Aug 14th and 15th at George Mason University, Fairfax. Approximately 50 participants from government agencies, companies, and not-for-profit associations gathered at GMU, Fairfax, VA to discuss the possibility, viability, sustainability for establishing an industry/university cooperative research center among the three sites of George Mason University (GMU), University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Harvard University (Harvard). Based on the center for spatial studies and national center for geographic information analyses at UCSB, the GMU center for intelligent spatial computing, and the Harvard center for geographic analysis, the new center is planned and established to conduct innovation-focused and deliverable-oriented research for the next 5-15 years to build the spatiotemporal infrastructure base by advancing a) human intelligence through spatiotemporal thinking, b) computer software and tools through spatiotemporal computing, and c) human capability of responding to deep scientific questions and grand engineering challenges through spatiotemporal applications. The GMU site is led by Dr. Chaowei Yang (Director), UCSB site is led by Dr. Keith Clarke (Co-Director), and Harvard site is led by Dr. Peter Bol (Co-Director). Currently, the center attracts over ten agencies and companies to collaboratively ensure the smooth transition of academic research to improved or new company products and services, and agency operations in a coordinated innovation process. The academia, agencies, and industry are building new capabilities for hazard responses, climate studies, social media, cloud computing, big data, environmental sciences, geospatial intelligence, and other domains.
