2016 Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) Principal Investigators Workshop

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This project will host a 1.5-day workshop in Arlington, VA, which will bring together the community of SI2 awardees (with the goal of involving one principal investigator from each SSE and SSI project, many of which are collaborative awards) from approximately 250 awards. The workshop will have participation from SI2 EAGER and RAPID awardees and selected awardees of the ACI VOSS program that examines cyberinfrastructures from the social and organizational perspective. In addition, the proximity to NSF will encourage participation by Program Officers from across the Foundation. Goals of this workshop include: (a) providing a focused forum for PIs to share technical information with each other and with NSF Program Officers, (b) encouraging exploration of emerging topics, (c) identifying emerging best practices across the supported software projects, (d) stimulating thinking on new ways of achieving software sustainability, and (d) disseminating the shared experiences of the researchers via an online web portal. The workshop is expected to host close to 150 SI2 and other awardees, other speakers and panelists. The workshop will use a hybrid style, blending a traditional, top-down driven agenda with a interactive, adaptive, participant-driven agenda. The proposed workshop will support the exchange of ideas among the current software cyberinfrastructure development projects. It will provide guidance on issues related to the development of robust software and to the problem of software sustainability. Involvement of program officers across NSF is expected to help the interdisciplinary SI2 awardees understand the relevance and impact of cyberinfrastructure throughout the NSF. The participation of these researchers and program officers in a common forum will help ensure that the cyberinfrastructure software developed as part of SI2 projects will be relevant and broadly applicable to the most science and engineering domains possible. The hybrid approach is innovative and holds the promise of creating rich interactions among PIs, resulting in richer collaboration and learning. The results of this workshop thus have the potential to guide cyberinfrastructure development and cyberinfrastructure driven research for both the participating projects and for the wider software development community.