Building Capacity for 21st Century Social Sciences; Washington, D.C., Spring, 2015

这次研讨会将汇集专家，讨论国家活力社会科学和转型社会科学的能力建设计划。它响应了跨多个科学学科、决策机构和私营企业对更丰富地了解复杂的人类社会系统的日益增长的需求。这样的计划将对社会政策中的风险和不确定性提供更全面的科学评估，包括意外的、特别是不受欢迎的政策后果。它还将有助于更好地预测快速和破坏性变化(即临界点和阶段变化)的潜力，这是复杂系统的特征。建设跨学科科学的重大能力，并利用先进技术了解人类社会的动态，将促进美国在基础和应用研究方面的领导地位，以应对我们在21世纪面临的重大挑战的社会层面。讲习班参与者将负责制定国家社会科学能力建设路线图，这是应对21世纪世界和社会面临的全球挑战所必需的。有一些与人类社会系统的组织和动态有关的重要科学问题，其规模和复杂性对于单个研究人员来说是难以解决的，需要一个社区规模的研究组织。在人类行为是地球系统的重要驱动力的世界中，挑战需要全球范围的人类社会科学来领导跨越社会、行为和自然科学的协作团队的跨学科研究。它需要先进的概念和方法来管理、合成和模拟与人类社会生态系统匹配所需的大小和复杂性的数据，以及处理这些系统今天生成和捕获的大量信息的计算工具。技术和社会变革的快速步伐正在以前所未有的方式改变着驯化的地球及其人类管理者，这要求社会科学也同样发生戏剧性的变革。

This workshop will bring together experts to address a national program of capacity building for dynamic and transformed social sciences. It responds to a growing need across multiple scientific disciplines, policy making institutions, and private enterprise for a richer understanding of complex human social systems. Such a program will provide a more thorough scientific assessment of risks and uncertainties in social policies, including unexpected and, especially, undesirable policy consequences. It will also help to better anticipate the potential for rapid and disruptive change (i.e., tipping points and phase changes) that are characteristic of complex systems. Building significant capacity in transdisciplinary science, and employing advanced technologies to understand the dynamics of human society, will promote United States leadership in basic and applied research on the social dimensions of the grand challenges we face in the twenty-first century.Workshop participants will be charged with developing a roadmap for building national capacity in the social sciences that is needed to meet global challenges facing our world and society in the twenty-first century. There are important scientific problems pertaining to the organization and dynamics of human social systems that are of such scale and complexity that they are intractable to individual researchers, and require a community-scale research organization. The challenges of a world in which human actions are significant drivers of earth systems requires a global-scale science of human society to lead interdisciplinary research by collaborative teams that span social, behavioral, and natural sciences. It requires advanced concepts and methods to manage, synthesize, and model data at the size and complexity needed to match human socio-ecological systems, and computational tools to process the vast quantities of information being generated and captured by these systems today. The rapid pace of technological and social change that is transforming both the domesticated earth and its human managers in unprecedented ways demands an equally dramatic transformation of social science.