NSF currently sponsors an intensive summer research workshop series in human language technology and robust intelligence, organized and hosted by Johns Hopkins University. These workshops have exhibited a relatively unique model of interactive peer review, dynamic expert team generation, research acceleration via a condensed and unusually close collaboration environment and intensive student mentorship. A Scientific Community On-Site Assessment Workshop (OSAW) is being held on July 30-31, 2008, to review and and improve upon this model and investigate the potential for its extension to new scientific disciplines. During the OSAW, a team of expert research-community stakeholders observes current summer workshop processes, interviews participants, receives detailed briefs on prior peer-review, topic-selection and research team recruitment processes, and reaches findings and makes recommendations regarding these goals.
The OSAW workshop will contribute to the progress of science by: (1) improving the existing NSF-sponsored intensive summer workshop series that has already engaged over 300 international participants and lead to hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and major scientific innovations, (2) the insights and conclusions reached by the OSAW, especially with respect to the interactive peer-review and intensive mentorship processes employed by the summer workshop, have the potential to inform and provide ideas for other peer-review and mentorship processes, such as utilized by NSF and other organizations, (3) the recommendations of the OSAW will provide a roadmap for the extension of the intensive summer-workshop model to other fields, with potential for the accelerated scientific progress and unique collaboration framework already realized by this model in human-language-technology fields.
