Neukom Interdisciplinary Working Groups

Neukom Interdisciplinary Working Groups – The NIWG initiative is designed to engender collaborations with a computational theme between faculty in different departments with the goal of promoting interdisciplinary computational work and providing seed funding for exploratory projects that often cannot find funding in standard disciplinary venues. Note that “computational” should be construed in its broadest possible interpretation and The Neukom Institute strongly encourages proposals from all around campus. This initiative is inspired by a similar construct at The Santa Fe Institute. Examples “Computational Cultural Evolution,” “Evolution, Complexity, and the Law,” “Causality,” “Evidence,” and “Compressed Sensing and Neural Processing.” Each of these has a computational aspect, but many other aspects as well.

Participants can be drawn from both within and outside the College. Possible goals of such a NIWG meeting might be to initiate an interdisciplinary line of work or to work together on a grant proposal, or to collaborate on a paper or collection of papers. The collaborative aspect of these kinds of meetings and their size will distinguish them from a standard workshop. To that end, the NIWGs must satisfy the following criteria:

• NIWGs are meant to be small (on the order of 8 or so participants).
• NIWGs must be proposed/sponsored by faculty from at least two departments with an explicitly interdisciplinary theme.
• NIWGs can extend from one to five days.
• The PIs on the NIWG must produce a summary document for the Neukom Institute.
• Written proposals should be at most two pages and should include the names of the proposed participants, approximate hoped for dates, a rationale of why this meeting is both necessary and timely as well as the hoped for outcomes from the NIWG meeting. The PIs should also send CVs. Additional supporting materials can be included.

 Budgeting guidelines: our basic assumptions are:

1. $700 travel per outside participant
2. $125/night hotel per outside participant
3. $65/day per diem per participant
4. $350/day for coffee/breaks
5. The PIs on the NIWG must produce a summary document of their working group collaboration for the records of The Neukom Institute.

The Neukom Institute will accept and review proposals, hoping to fund ten per year, with deadlines for proposals: September 1, 2011, December 1, 2011, March 1, 2012, and June 1, 2012. Please send proposals to the Neukom Institute