UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Institute for CyberScience (ICS) will host a collaboration session to bring together researchers interested in an upcoming National Science Foundation (NSF) funding opportunity on “Smart and Connected Communities” (S&CC). The session will take place from 10 a.m. to noon Friday, Sept. 1, in 233A HUB-Robeson Center.
The session is designed to help researchers meet potential collaborators; learn more about the NSF program, which focuses on the use of technology to enhance how communities function; and brainstorm ideas for proposals. It is free and open to all Penn State researchers. Interested researchers can RSVP here.
“Ambitious S&CC proposals will require interdisciplinary teams, but it’s not always easy for a computer engineer to find a sociologist to partner with, or for a health expert to connect with a climate scientist,” said ICS Director Jenni Evans. “This session will bring experts from a broad spectrum of fields together and make finding collaborators easier.”
S&CC aims to support interdisciplinary research on how municipalities — from cities to towns to rural villages — can use technology to operate more efficiently, protect citizens’ privacy, and improve the quality of life. As “smart” devices become increasingly prevalent, researchers are finding new ways to harness data from these technologies to improve community living.
S&CC has previously funded a wide range of projects, including work on decreasing traffic congestion in cities, maintaining power during heat waves, and improving emergency response times.
The Institute for CyberScience is one of the five interdisciplinary research institutes under the Office of the Vice President for Research, and is dedicated to supporting cyber-enabled research across the disciplines. ICS builds an active community of researchers using computational methods in a wide range of fields through co-hiring of tenure-track faculty, providing seed funding for ambitious computational research projects, and offering access to high-performance computing resources through its Advanced CyberInfrastructure. With the support of ICS, Penn State researchers harness the power of big data, big simulation, and big computing to solve the world’s problems. For more information, visit https://ics.psu.edu or email ics@psu.edu.