BCC-SBE: PI-NET: Poli-Informatics Research Coordination Network

这个研究协作网络(RCN)推动了政治信息学新的跨学科领域的发展。政治信息学通过促进对非常大的和非结构化的政府数据集的分析，将信息学引入政治研究。RCN的中心目标是鼓励代表不同学科的学者，如计算机科学、信息科学、电气工程、统计学和计算语言学，合作并将他们的技能应用于美国政府活动的分析。在三年的时间里，RCN将建立一个新的跨学科学术网络；举办研究竞赛和研讨会；培训下一代政治信息学研究人员；并制作一份论文纲要，展示这一新领域的重要性。庞大的政府数据集启发了以前无法想象的研究问题、分析方法和技术工具。RCN将在如何研究和理解立法、预算和政策执行等政府活动方面带来宝贵的创新。它将鼓励具有不同研究视角的高能力学者将他们的注意力集中在迅速扩大的政府数据储存库带来的重要技术和实质性挑战上。这些研究人员为应对这些挑战而开发的基础设施随后将可供其他人使用--学生、记者、利益团体和公民。因此，RCN的一个至关重要的更广泛的影响将是促进公众对美国政府的角色和活动的更好理解。

This Research Collaborative Network (RCN) advances the new interdisciplinary field of PoliInformatics. PoliInformatics brings informatics to political research by promoting the analysis of very large and unstructured government datasets. The central objective of the RCN is to encourage scholars representing diverse disciplines such as computer science, information science, electrical engineering, statistics and computational linguistics to collaborate and apply their skills to the analysis of U.S. government activity. Over a three year period, the RCN will establish a new interdisciplinary scholarly network; conduct research competitions and workshops; train the next generation of PoliInformatics researchers; and produce a compendium of papers demonstrating the importance of this new field.Large government data sets inspire previously unimagined research questions, analytic methods, and technology tools. The RCN will lead to valuable innovations in how government activities such as lawmaking, budgeting and policy implementation are studied and understood. It will encourage highly capable scholars possessing diverse research perspectives to focus their attention on important technical and substantive challenges presented by rapidly expanding repositories of government data. The infrastructure that these researchers develop to address these challenges will then be available for use by others--students, journalists, interest groups, and citizens. Thus a critically important broader impact of the RCN will be to foster improved public understanding of the roles and activities of the U.S. government.