CC* CIRA: Southwest Higher Education Knowledge and Technology Exchange (SHEKATE)

新冠肺炎疫情暴露了西方国家长途、中路和最后一公里宽带连接的不足。遥远的距离、稀少的人口和孤立的部落社区是高等教育界面临的新挑战。来自《关怀法案》（CARES Act）的新联邦资金和州拨款的涌入，为规划、建设和交付网络基础设施的新基础提供了新的机会。虽然在大流行前的环境中需要和需要规划和协作，但现在，领导组织需要进行区域范围的思考和规划，这是重建西部山区的一个基本因素。作为一个区域、多国家、多机构的合作，SHEKATE准备参与、规划和实施新的网络基础设施，在一个连接昂贵且与研究人员隔离的地方支持和改善科学，在这个地方，区域首席信息官和国家研究和网络合作共同努力解决区域规模的研究问题。SHEKATE的合作规划活动将该地区研究型大学的研究人员引入并联系起来，跨越州和国际边界，与联邦和州宽带倡议合作，在该地区建立一个新的研究核心。SHEKATE会议由亚利桑那州立大学、太阳走廊网络和犹他州教育和远程医疗网络作为规划领导，重点关注研究人员使城市生物识别、人工智能、西部宽带、网络基础设施可持续性和潜在的组织结构，这些组织结构为在最复杂的城乡地区之一建立CI提供了新方法。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deficiencies of long haul, middle mile, and last mile broadband connectivity in the West. Long distances, sparse populations, and isolated tribal communities characterized new challenges for the higher education community. An influx of new federal funding and state allocations from the CARES Act released new opportunities to plan, build, and deliver a new foundation for cyberinfrastructure. Whereas planning and collaboration were needed and required in a pre-pandemic environment, the demand for regional-scale thinking and planning by leadership organizations is now an essential element in rebuilding the mountain west. As a regional, multi-state, multi-institution collaboration, SHEKATE is prepared to engage, plan, and implement the new cyberinfrastructure that supports and improves science in a place where connectivity is expensive and isolated from researchers, and where regional CIOs and state research and networking collaborations work collectively to solve regional-scale research problems. SHEKATE’s collaborative planning events introduce and connect researchers from the region’s research universities to cross state and international boundaries and to work with federal and state broadband initiatives to establish a new research core across the region. Led by Arizona State University, the Sun Corridor Network, and the Utah Education and Telehealth Network as planning leads, SHEKATE conference events focus on researcher enabled urban biometrics, artificial intelligence, broadband in the West, cyberinfrastructure sustainability, and the underlying organizational structures that inform a new approach to building CI in one of the most complex urban and rural regions.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.