Cyberinfrastructure for Collaborative Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

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Research at the frontiers of science now requires global collaborations, terabyte data infrastructures, and software tools for automating research and enabling collaboration. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Bertenthal and his colleagues will develop a Social Informatics Data (SID) Grid. The SID Grid will enable researchers to collect real-time multimodal behavior at multiple time scales. The development of a distributed data warehouse supported by a grid infrastructure will embolden researchers to address research questions that far exceed the capacities of any individual lab, such as how we construct our cognitive, social and cultural worlds through multimodal channels of communication, including speech, gesture, prosody, posture, facial expression, etc. or how the unfolding in real-time of social behaviors is a function of their neurobiological underpinnings, developmental status, context and cultural norms. The creation of the SID Grid will provide the needed infrastructure for supporting collaborative research in the social and behavioral sciences. This infrastructure will encourage data sharing and accelerate the development of standards for collecting and coding physiological and behavioral data. Outreach and dissemination will consist of creating a website with tutorials for using the SID Grid, organizing workshops on use of the infrastructure, and soliciting researchers to conduct multimodal research in the SuperLab. The availability of these databases and software tools promises to help usher in the next generation of behavioral sciences and scientists.