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Projects
Envisioning Research Impacts
We are developing an organizational structure for envisioning which areas of R&D are poised to generate beneficial innovations in computer and information science and engineering.
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Guiding a strategic vision for tech R&D
Computer and information science and engineering (CISE) research leads to many beneficial innovations, but it is hard to predict which research directions will ultimately produce the greatest impacts. This project, titled, “Envisioning Sociotechnical Ecosystems Research,” enlists experts from across many disciplines and sectors to inform a strategic vision for CISE research based on anticipated impacts.
The Problem
Whether CISE innovations align with national and societal priorities depends on their adoption within, and impact on, the greater sociotechnical ecosystem—the set of technical components and actors, the economic transactions between these entities, the legal system governing them, and, most importantly, the human end users. Whereas the technical aspects of this ecosystem can be understood through a narrow disciplinary lens, understanding the sociotechnical ecosystem requires a broader set of disciplines. However, in practice, decisions about what research may lead to beneficial innovations are informed by a very limited set of perspectives: venture capitalists and corporate executives in the commercial sphere, and technical program and review committees in the academic sphere.
How We’re Addressing It
LWe are developing a new organizational structure for envisioning research directions for CISE that is informed by representatives of the social sciences, legal studies, and civil society, as well as scientific, industry, and government leaders. Through a systematic process of interviews and workshops, we are eliciting these experts’ best ideas about new research directions, as well the theories of change that motivate these ideas. These theories will be compiled into computational models of sociotechnical ecosystems.
The process involves five steps:
- Identifying seed participants including scientific, industry, and government experts, as well as computational social scientists and non-technical scholars of technology policy and ethics;
- Conducting semi-structured interviews with identified experts;
- Compiling the results into structured data and building composite models of sociotechnical ecosystems and the hypothesized dynamics of research impact;
- Holding workshops in which the interview process and the resulting composite models are reviewed, critiqued, and “red-teamed”; and
- Disseminating the results online, back to participants, and to NSF program officers, culminating in a written report and a tutorial on running such processes.
Through this process, we will begin to build a strategic vision of CISE R&D that is both sensitive to complex sociotechnical and ecosystemic change and consistent with computational thinking.
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