Smart and Connected Communities Workshop: Visioning for Effective Community/University/Industry Collaboration Models

随着人口规模和人口结构的变化、基础设施老化以及经济和环境压力的增加，城市和社区面临着越来越多的挑战。城市和社区、大学和行业之间的合作有可能解决这些挑战——为信息和通信技术创新、研究能力建设和劳动力增长提供机会。该项目包括将于2017年7月在波士顿大学和2017年11月在华盛顿特区举办的两部分研讨会。该系列研讨会的目标是确定并提出有效的城市-大学-产业合作模式，帮助弥合社区启发问题的基础研究之间的差距，旨在提供可部署的解决方案和可持续的服务，以提高各种智能和连接社区环境中的生活质量。研讨会的预期成果是产生一份报告，提出最佳实践和合作模式，特别强调可操作的机会，以增强跨部门智能和连接社区研究的影响。具体而言，该项目旨在理解和阐明资源和过程，从而在城市、大学和工业之间产生强大、互利、持久的关系；将基础的社会技术研究转化为对社区有意义影响的应用；并建立必要的基础，使应用程序能够长期维持下去。此外，确定改进的流程和激励兼容的协作模式有可能催化一些更广泛的影响，包括：通过转化研究提高学生参与度和体验式学习；确保已建立的关系和已制定的解决方案的可持续性；通过让代表性不足的少数民族和早期职业研究人员参与讲习班的规划和活动，发展多样化的人力资本；推进技术商业化和业务发展。

Cities and communities face growing challenges as population size and demographics change, infrastructure ages, and economic and environmental pressures increase. Collaborations among cities and communities, universities, and industry have the potential to address these challenges -- providing opportunities for information and communication technology innovations, research capacity building, and workforce growth. This project includes a two-part workshop to be hosted at Boston University in July 2017 and in Washington, D.C. in November 2017. The goal of the workshop series is to identify and propose effective models of city-university-industry collaboration that help bridge the gap between fundamental research on problems inspired by communities, aiming to provide deployable solutions and sustainable services that improve the quality of life in various smart-and-connected community settings.The anticipated outcome of the workshops is to generate a report that puts forth best practices and models of collaboration, with a particular emphasis on actionable opportunities that will enhance the impact of cross-sector smart-and-connected communities research. Specifically, this project seeks to understand and elucidate resources and processes, which yield robust, mutually beneficial, enduring relationships between cities, universities, and industries; translate fundamental, sociotechnical research into applications that have a meaningful impact within the community; and create foundations necessary for applications to be sustained over time. In addition, identifying improved processes and incentive-compatible collaboration models has the potential to catalyze a number of broader impacts, including: enhancing student engagement and experiential learning through translational research; ensuring sustainability of established relationships and of developed solutions; developing a diverse human capital by engaging underrepresented minorities and early career researchers in workshop planning and activities; and advancing technology commercialization and business development.