Convergence Accelerator

Launched in 2019, the Convergence Accelerator builds upon basic research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact. We will build upon foundational research that spans from computer science to human centered design to ethics, the law and public policy. The workshop will explore frameworks, to support knowledge representation, and to develop appropriate design approaches and protocols. The NSF Program Manager for the EDAIs Workshop is Mike Pozmantier.

A convergence team-building approach will allow the formation of cross-disciplinary teams to address a variety of design challenges. Team members will be drawn from across multiple reference disciplines including the following:

• Computer Science: Robotics, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation, Explainable AI.

• Human Centered Design: Research in Human Computer Interaction, Intelligent User Interfaces, and Ethnography.

• Philosophy, Ethics and the Law.

• Public policy.

Meet a societal need at scale: The workshop will be informed by a range of applications from healthcare to service robots in home care and elder care settings to smart environments and public policy settings. The frameworks will be designed to be flexible and scalable, so that they can handle variations of temporal scale, of system complexity, and so that they can evolve. To have real world impact, the design frameworks must be informed by a range of applications and domain experts including the following:

• Healthcare.

• Bio-ethical and epidemiological decision support systems.

• Care / Service robots in home care and elder care settings.

• Smart cities and smart environments.

• Recommendations in social media and (personalized) business services, e.g., financial recommendations.

• Law enforcement and other public policy applications.

Partnerships and Engagement: The EDAIs Workshop should help to identify convergence research challenges that will rely on partnerships and foster engagement across multiple academic disciplines, industry and government or NGOs.

Broader Impact and Broadening Participation: