Workshops: Building Engineered Complex Systems

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The award will support the organization of three annual grantees workshops for the NSF program on Building Engineered Complex Systems (BECS), as well as to provide funding for travel and local expenses for participants. The first workshop is to be held at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA, in October 2010, and the other two in October 2011 and 2012. The workshops will facilitate communication between projects, including senior investigators and students, to share ideas, cross-fertilize and possibly incubate future collaborations between researchers on the conceptual and theoretical basis of complex systems. It is anticipated that each workshop will involve about 100 participants, including grantees and interested observers. A small number of prominent researchers external to the BECS program will be invited as keynote speakers.The BECS program assembles teams of engineers and mathematicians to attempt to develop conceptual and theoretical foundations of complex systems theory. Some of the most challenging engineering design problems today involve engineered complex systems. The goals of the BECS program include leveraging the complementary skills of researchers in engineering and mathematical sciences to analyze existing complex systems and develop formal methods underpinning the important features of complex behavior, to pave the way for rapid exploitation of these new behaviors in engineered systems. The annual workshops will allow active transmission of new ideas between research groups, and communication of results to the scientific and engineering community, to expedite achievement of the program goals.Because of the many areas in which engineered complex systems arise (energy production, transportation, climate modeling, biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc.) there is the potential for significant societal impact in a vast number of applications. The ideas and directions identified by BECS grantees have the potential to influence a variety of fundamental research areas as well as influence research in a number of associated application areas critical to national technology and competiveness goals. The majority of the grant budget will fund travel to graduate student researchers, enhancing their educational experiences.