| |
It has been
over a decade since Bill Wulf defined the concept of a collaboratory as
a "…'center without walls,' in which the nation's researchers
can perform their research without regard to geographical location [Wulf,
1989]." Since this initial moment of definition the landscape of
distance collaboration in scientific endeavors has changed dramatically.
A variety of research communities have been seriously exploring new types
of comprehensive technology-mediated environments to better support science
and education. Communities and movements to create such environments have
a number of origins, goals, and names including collaboratory, grid, and
e-science environments. Recently the combined technological, human, and
institutional underpinnings for such environments are being called cyberinfrastructure.
The goal of our November symposium is to bring together international
representatives of these movements/communities in hopes of creating better
mutual awareness, harmonizing understanding, and instigating coordinated
activities to accelerate research, development, and deployment of these
new environments to support science. A related objective is to articulate
both the technical and social/organizational prerequisites for success
in these endeavors.
We are, for
example, inviting principals from the grid and distributed terascale activities
centered around the NSF PACIs and Argonne National Labs; from the space
science collaboratory and science of collaboratory projects centered at
the University of Michigan; from the e-science initiatives in the UK and
EU, from various discipline-specific grid/collaboratory projects funded
by the NSF-ITR and other federal programs, and from the recent
NSF Blue Ribbon Panel on Cyberinfrastructure. Although the focus of the
Symposium will be on support of scientific research, this nascent movement
has profound implications for science education, for education and research
in the humanities, and indeed for the future of the entire higher education
enterprise.
|
|
