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

本次研讨会将汇集专家，讨论一项针对充满活力和转型的社会科学的国家能力建设方案。它响应了跨多个科学学科、政策制定机构和私营企业对复杂人类社会系统的更丰富理解的日益增长的需求。这样一个项目将对社会政策的风险和不确定性，包括意外的，特别是不希望的政策后果，提供更全面、更科学的评估。它还将有助于更好地预测作为复杂系统特征的快速和破坏性变化（即临界点和相变）的潜力。建立跨学科科学的重要能力，并采用先进技术来了解人类社会的动态，将促进美国在基础和应用研究方面的领导地位，这些研究涉及我们在21世纪面临的重大挑战的社会层面。讲习班的参加者将负责制定一个路线图，建设社会科学方面的国家能力，以应付我们的世界和社会在21世纪面临的全球性挑战。有一些重要的科学问题与人类社会系统的组织和动态有关，这些问题的规模和复杂性对个体研究人员来说是难以解决的，需要一个社区规模的研究组织。人类活动是地球系统的重要驱动因素，世界面临的挑战需要一门全球性的人类社会科学，通过跨越社会、行为和自然科学的合作团队来领导跨学科研究。它需要先进的概念和方法来管理、综合和模拟与人类社会生态系统相匹配的规模和复杂性的数据，以及处理这些系统产生和捕获的大量信息的计算工具。技术和社会变革的快速步伐正以前所未有的方式改变着被驯化的地球及其人类管理者，这要求社会科学进行同样戏剧性的变革。

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.