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 include "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:
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
The Neukom Institute will accept and review proposals three times a year with the following deadlines: September 1, 2012, December 1, 2012, March 1, 2013 and June 1, 2013. We hope to fund ten Working Groups per year. Please send proposals to the Neukom Institute
