*The Establishment of the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center *

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What if there was a way to save hundreds of lives and reduce the loss of
billions of dollars if a major earthquake occurred in California or a
big volcano erupted in Yellowstone National Park? Imagine integrating
energy sciences, earth sciences, and bioscience to find a sustainable
energy resource? Could we better mitigate the climate change impact to
coastal zones and islands around the globe with a clearer understanding
of the evolution of the Earth? These 21^st -century challenges require
deep understanding of how the phenomena are linked in space and time, as
well as trailblazing new thinking, methodology and tools.


On September 15, 2013, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry &
University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) Program funded three
universities to establish the I/UCRC for Spatiotemporal Thinking,
Computing, and Applications to research potential solutions to address
such challenges. The three collaborating universities---University of
California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), George Mason University (Mason), and
Harvard---will each take the leadership in thinking, computing and
application respectively. Numerous government and industry sponsors are
included as partners in the research. See www.stcenter.net
<http://www.stcenter.net/>.


Led by Chaowei Yang (Mason, director), Keith Clarke (UCSB, co-director),
and Peter Bol (Harvard, co-director), the U.S. NSF Spatiotemporal
Innovation Center is projected to receive more than $2 million/year from
agencies and industry to conduct transformative research and development
that could help us come up with solutions to those grand challenging
issues. Michael Goodchild, emeritus professor of geography at UCSB,
serves as the science advisory committee chair. Through long-term
investigation and expansion to other qualified and complementary
universities, the center is targeted to build the national and
international spatiotemporal infrastructure to advance a) human
intelligence through spatiotemporal thinking, b) computer software and
tools through spatiotemporal computing, and c) human capability of
responding to deep scientific questions and grand engineering challenges
through spatiotemporal applications.

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*Site Directors*

§Mason Site: Chaowei Yang (cyang3 at gmu.edu) and Paul Houser (phouser
at gmu.edu)

§UCSB Site:  Keith Clarke (kclarke at geog.ucsb.edu) and Jeff Dozier
(dozier at bren.ucsb.edu)

§Harvard Site:  Peter Bol (pkbol at fas.harvard.edu) and Wendy Guan
(wguan at fas.harvard.edu)


Center website: www.stcenter.net <http://www.stcenter.net>


NSF I/UCRC program website: www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/iucrc/
<http://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/iucrc/>

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Chen XU, PhD

George Mason University