Conference: US-Taiwan Workshop on Smart and Connected Communities, Agriculture, and Cyber-Physical Systems Research

This project supports the coordination of a series of workshops and meetings to explore deeper scientific collaborations between researchers from Taiwan and researchers in the United States in areas related to Smart & Connected Communities and related disciplines. The meetings will be arranged in conjunction with the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the United States.

A significant challenge with international collaboration is to go beyond the matchmaking phase, in order to encourage deeper collaboration that could lead to new discoveries.The proposed effort takes place over several distinct phases: (1) a virtual meeting between US and Taiwanese participants, aimed at discovering opportunities to start meaningful collaborations that could result in deeper engagement; (2) international collaboration through existing funding mechanisms, based on exchange of data or replication of results to build confidence in collaboration mechanisms; (3) an in-person workshop that allows collaborating teams to present their efforts from Phase 2; and (4) planning for funded engagements between researchers based on promising lines of inquiry.

The virtual workshop explores, over 2 evenings, similarities between efforts taking place in Taiwan and the United States along the lines of Smart & Connected Communities, Cyber-Physical Systems, and Smart Agriculture. This (virtual) workshop will include a discussion of the scope of the collaboration led by NSF and TECRO, brief introductions of researchers, and then breakout sessions where researchers explore how their research could be deepened through cross-pacific collaboration.

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.