The Establishment
of the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center
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 21st-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.
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.
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
NSF I/UCRC program website: www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/iucrc/
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Chen XU, PhD
George Mason University