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

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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.