WORKSHOP: Building Capacity for Sociotechnical Innovation in Next-Generation Network Applications

University Of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal seeks to further a network of sociotechnical researchers in academia and industry capable of developing innovative applications that leverage next-generation gigabit networking infrastructure. This will foster new multidisciplinary partnerships between the social and computing sciences that will challenge established researchers and develop a new generation of students capable and confident in working in this area. The complex domains addressed by these applications, for example city-wide, media-rich socialinformation spaces for homeless citizens, will necessitate fundamental advances in network science. The emergent co-evolutionary properties will also likely drive research in human-centered computing. The urban government partnerships enable a scale of deployment typically impractical for academic research labs. This will enable at-scale experimentation with a critical mass of users in authentic usage environments, which is essential for advancing our understanding of social computing. The project proposes a culminating two-day proto-proposal development workshop. The projects that emerge from this workshop will help envision a new future in which high-bandwidth connectivity coupled with a reengineered Internet enables new forms of social interaction and digital citizenship.