Organizing CSSI PI Meeting - Towards a National Cyberinfrastructure Ecosystem

This project will host a 2-day workshop in Seattle, WA, which will bring together the community of Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) awardees (with the goal of involving at least one principal investigator (PI) from each Elements, Frameworks, Institute Conceptualizations, and Scientific Software Innovation Institutes project, many of which are collaborative awards) from approximately 250 awards. This will be the first CSSI PI meeting. In addition, PIs from the prior connected solicitations (such as Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) and Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBS)) will be invited, as well as PIs on NSF awards in which CSSI seed investments were made (Venture funded PIs as well as CSSI Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) awardees). In addition, the proximity to Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP20) will encourage participation by non-PI community to further inform the academic community of CSSI goals and projects. Goals of this workshop include: (1) Serve as a focused forum for PIs to share technical information with each other, community, and NSF Program Officers; (2) Explore innovative topics emerging within software and data infrastructure communities; (3) Discuss emerging best practices across the supported software and data infrastructure projects; (4) Stimulate thinking on new ways of achieving software and data sustainability; (5) Gather the shared experiences in an online web portal. The workshop is expected to host close to 250 CSSI and other awardees, other speakers and panelists.

The proposed workshop will support the exchange of ideas among the current cyberinfrastructure development projects. It will provide guidance on issues related to the development of robust software and data artifacts and to the problem of their sustainability. Involvement of program officers across NSF is expected to help the interdisciplinary CSSI awardees understand the relevance and impact of cyberinfrastructure throughout the NSF. The participation of these awardees, program officers, and other researchers in a common forum will help ensure that the cyberinfrastructure developed as part of CSSI projects will be relevant and broadly applicable to most science and engineering domains. The results of this workshop thus have the potential to guide cyberinfrastructure development and cyberinfrastructure driven research for both the participating projects and for the wider cyberinfrastructure development community.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.