2020 NSF CISE-SBE Workshop on Harnessing the Computational and Social Sciences to Solve Critical Societal Problems

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This award funds the 2020 NSF CISE-SBE Workshop on Harnessing the Computational and Social Sciences to Solve Critical Societal Problems. This invitation-only three-day meeting will be to be jointly convened by the National Science Foundation Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). It is increasingly apparent that many of the systems on which our society depends for its health, prosperity, and security are neither purely social nor purely technical ones. Rather, they are socio-technical systems. For example workplace relationships, media markets, health delivery systems, and criminal justice organizations are all increasingly characterized by a complex mixture of human actors and institutions on the one hand, and digital platforms and algorithms on the other hand. Efforts to design, manage, audit, and ultimately improve these systems to the benefit of society therefore lie at the intersection of the computational sciences and the social-behavioral sciences. This workshop will bring together experts from nationally recognized institutions comprising a diverse range of stakeholders and perspectives drawn from academia, industry, government, and philanthropy to discuss three core themes at the intersection of the computational and social-behavioral sciences. This intersection has been an area of increasing research interest and innovation in recent years, generating new conferences, funding opportunities, and jobs, both in academia and industry. In order to generate practical solutions to real-world socio-technical problems, however, a number of challenges must be overcome that will require new streams of funding and also new models of collaboration, between the computational and social-behavioral sciences, and also among academia, government and industry. The workshop is organized around three core substantive themes, each of which corresponds to a contemporary societal concern of widespread interest: increasing opportunity for all Americans, while reducing harmful disparities; improving the trustworthiness of the information ecosystem; and empowering the skilled technical workforceIn addition to sketching out a research agenda for each of these substantive areas, the workshop would also focus attention on four cross-cutting challenges: building large-scale, shared data infrastructures for research purposes; partnering with industry around problems of shared interest; fostering collaborations between CISE and SBE researcher; and developing training and educational programs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.