CI-TEAM Demonstration Project: Advancing Cyberinfrastructure-based Science through Education, Training, and Mentoring of Science Communities

University Of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM

Investigators

Abstract

Progress in cyberinfrastructure depends on workforce development both within computer science and across many application domains. A key issue is the need for effective processes by which scientific communities can learn to integrate cyberinfrastructure into their research. This University of New Mexico project will develop an innovative process for mobilizing a group of distributed, interdisciplinary scientists into a community of practice that is able to effectively embed cyberinfrastructure-enhanced approaches into their work. The project will contribute to our understanding of sociotechnical issues of cross-disciplinary, distributed collaboration, while also generating innovative research approaches in a community that has not traditionally been represented in high-end scientific computing. The target scientists are engaged in forecasting the impact of climate, population, and land cover/land use change on plant distributions in the American Southwest. There are four research groups represented, each of which is approaching the problem from a different perspective. Collectively they could develop complex approaches that integrate the strengths of each, if the technical, disciplinary and institutional barriers could be overcome. The approach will make use of our best understanding of computer-mediated distributed collaboration and will partner the scientists with technology and cyberinfrastructure specialists to overcome these barriers. We will use a combination of education, training, and mentoring tasks informed by social science and organizational learning theory. The project includes a graduate seminar on cyberinfrastructure that will be hosted on the AccessGrid by the Rio Grande Corridor High Performance Computing Centers and taught simultaneously at six institutions, allowing for participation by remote researchers via desktop teleconferencing. The seminar will expose participants to a range of cyberinfrastructure topics and ongoing cyberinfrastructure projects at participating and national computing centers. This project will have broad impacts through introducing a new scientific community, composed of all levels from graduate students to late career professionals, and consisting of nearly equal-representation of women, to a new way of doing science. It will form new partnerships across scientific and technical disciplines. It will provide an innovative new pathway for moving groups of scientists to cyberinfrastructure-based approaches that can be replicated in any science community. Such replication is essential for answering the complex, broad-scale, and integrative questions that typify 21st century science.