EAGER: Building a Starting Core for No-Boundary Education and Research Network

该团队提出了“无边界思维(NBT)”的新概念，该概念源于2013年在阿肯色州小石城举行的由NSF EPSCoR支持的生物信息学研讨会，以及后续的会议和讨论。其目的是建立一个启动核心，通过大学和项目的创新网络，进一步探索教育和研究中的无边界思维。无边界思维将是一组分散的研究人员、学生和科学挑战之间的关键联系。这个项目是由来自13个州的19个机构的24名教职员工共同努力的，代表的研究领域包括基础生命科学、生物学、农业、生物物理学、生物化学、工程学、计算机科学、数学和统计学。NBT的重点是定义无边界问题。其目标是通过发展“无国界教育和研究网络”来教育和培训有NBT的学生。该团队将确定目前跨学科研究或大数据方法不能很好解决的3-4个无边界研究问题，并在问题定义中应用无边界思维。重点是定义问题，而不仅仅是解决问题。然后，学生将通过研究项目和问题学习无边界思维方法，这将导致理解数据、方法和基础设施/高性能计算在定义和解决问题中的作用，并为他们提供机会学习整合数据收集、方法设计和基础设施以应对科学研究挑战。外联活动将包括召开一次全国会议，讨论当前跨学科研究和大数据对科学和教育的影响，以及如何在全国范围内进一步推广NBT。

The team proposes a new concept of "No-Boundary Thinking (NBT)", which emerged from an NSF EPSCoR-supported Workshop in Bioinformatics at Little Rock, Arkansas in 2013, as well as follow-on meetings and discussions. The aim is to build a starting core to further explore no-boundary thinking in education and research through an innovative network of universities and projects. No-boundary thinking will be the key connection among a distributed set of researchers, students and science challenges. This project is a joint effort of 24 faculty members from 19 institutions from 13 states, with the represented research areas including fundamental life sciences, biology, agriculture, biophysics, biochemistry, engineering, computer science, mathematics, and statistics.The focus of NBT is no-boundary problem defining. The goal is to educate and train students with NBT through development of a "No-Boundary Education and Research Network". The team will Identify 3-4 no-boundary research problems for which current interdisciplinary research or bigdata approaches do not work well and apply no-boundary thinking in problem defining. The focus is problem defining, not just problem solving. Then, students will learn with a no-boundary thinking approach through research projects and problems, which should lead to an understanding of the roles of data, approaches, and infrastructure/High Performance Computing in problem defining and solving, and provide them with opportunities to learn to integrate data collection, approach design, and infrastructure to address scientific research challenges. Outreach will include a national meeting to discuss the impacts of current interdisciplinary research and big-data to science and education, and how to further promote NBT nationally.