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

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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.