Jennifer Dunne, M.S. - US grants

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biological Informatics for fiscal year 2000.

The research and training plan is in the area of ecology and is entitled, " A Web-Based Combinatorial Approach to the Effects of Biodiversity Loss on Complex Ecological Networks." Ecological research into biodiversity loss is limited by what experiments can actually be conducted and by the underlying theory which is complex, making it difficult to separate the many interacting processes. This project applies global optimization techniques and network analyses to high quality food-web data to simulate effects of small to large biodiversity losses on complex communities. Systematic deletion of combinations of species in empirical and model food-webs are being used to generate theory that distinguishes effects of reducing species richness from effects of eliminating particular species' functions on ecosystems.

This project will establish an Internet database of food web, which describe the trophic structure and function of ecological networks, combined with tools that will increase the ability of scientists and students to exchange and analyze information about the networks. The database design will be extensible to other ecological interactions and network types. The content will focus on trophic interactions among organisms and also bioenergetic parameters that enable the modeling of network dynamics. These biocomplexity informatics activities serve the user interested in network theory relating to biological and non-biological systems. The project involves an interdisciplinary collaboration in ecology, informatics, computer science and information technology. In addition to San Francisco State University, the Santa Fe Institute and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis are involved. Broader impacts include establishing an interdisciplinary interdepartmental collaboration at a minority inner-city public university and increasing the participation of underrepresented minorities in ecology and computer science.

The Santa Fe Institute is awarded a grant to extend, integrate, and automate access to and analysis of ecological data by developing and implementing proven and emerging information technologies, particularly those related to the Semantic Web. This will be done "horizontally" by developing integrative web services somewhat similar to "mash-ups" for several large ecological databases and by developing graphical user interfaces enabled by these services to access disparate types of data, seamlessly feed the data into workflow systems, and conduct integrated analyses in an automatically documented manner. These activities will be integrated so that users can easily access a wide variety of ecological data and analyses based on concepts such as taxonomy, habitat, geography, and trophic relations. Graphical user interfaces developed in this project will enable integrated analysis of data related to plant-herbivore dynamics by drawing on plant abundance data from survey databases, identifying associated local herbivores and their body sizes from online food web databases, and analyzing contemporaneous time series of those herbivores drawn from databases on global populations dynamics. The products of this project will transform biology by creating new technologies used to introduce deeply functional informatics "mash-ups" that synergize existing informatics resources using more user-friendly integrative UIs. Broader impacts include an enhanced infrastructure for research and education at the interface of computer and natural sciences; increased roles for underrepresented students and researchers; and wide dissemination and outreach through diverse media, meetings and professional networks as well as curricular activities at multiple levels. The project will be carried out in collaboration with the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Ecology Lab, University of Maryland, College Park, San Francisco State University, the University of Arizona, and Microsoft Research. Further information about this project may be found at the lab website: http://www.foodwebs.org.

GUTS y Girls is a three-year ITEST Strategies project targeting middle school girls in Santa Fe, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. This project builds on a previously funded NSF Academies for Young Scientist award (06-39637) and includes partnerships between the Santa Fe Institute and MIT, University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, New Mexico State University, Santa Fe Complex, Girl Scouts of New Mexico Trails, the Supercomputing Challenge, regional educational organizations, and local schools. GUTS y Girls is designed to build the STEM and ICT workforce by engaging girls in exciting cyber-enabled learning experiences that prepare them for future careers, create and study a network of support using social networking tools, and develop a replicable program model.

Project deliverables include Monthly Saturday Workshops and two-week Summer Intensive Workshops. The 7-hour Saturday workshops expose girls to a wide variety of STEM/ICT jobs and professionals while engaging them in creative projects that build their confidence. During the two-week Summer Intensive Workshop, girls gain an understanding of complex systems concepts through hands-on activities and participatory simulations. Participants investigate topics of local relevance, view them through the lens of complex systems, and then apply agent-based modeling and network analysis tools. By fostering an understanding of complex systems and developing girls' computational thinking, computer programming, computational modeling, critical thinking, and spatial skills, GUTS y Girls prepares participants for a wide range of STEM and ICT fields including computer science, ecology, engineering, and mathematics. GUTS y Girls' secondary strategy is to develop and study a support system for girls by creating a virtual clubhouse using social networking to communicate with female STEM/ICT practitioners and student mentors. All project activities are designed to support the New Mexico state standards in science and math for grades 5-8.

The target audience includes 300 low-income Hispanic and Native American youth. Project activities are hands-on, address real-world problems, and engage professionals from the field, all characteristics found in successful science and math programs that serve young women. A mixed-methods evaluation approach is planned which assesses changes in awareness of STEM and ICT fields; technical and thinking skills; understanding of complex systems and uses of computer modeling; and interest and attitudes towards STEM content and careers. This project provides insight into whether student engagement in cyber-enabled STEM learning experiences builds capacity for future endeavors in STEM and if the use of social networks and STEM mentors can sustain student interest and involvement.

This project will improve our understanding of coupled natural-human systems and advance the frontiers of natural and social sciences, integrating them through a focus on model systems comprising four well-studied islands before and after a millennium of human occupation. The project team will develop and test conceptual and quantitative theory that emphasizes feedbacks between humans and the complex ecological systems that support them. The project applies archaeological and paleo-ecological methods to increase understanding of the relationships between initial conditions and subsequent developmental trajectories in the four study socio-ecosystems. This understanding will be used to develop and constrain computational models which will be used to test theories regarding long-term human-ecology feedbacks. The project seeks in particular to integrate the dual roles of humans as subsistence consumers of resources and as market-driven exploiters of resources. The understanding and integrated models will be used to explore the sustainability of people's extraction of biomass (e.g., fish, fiber, fuel, and timber) from complex ecosystems in the context of ecosystem services and environmental change. This work includes three activities: 1) Build a comprehensive network theory of dynamic coupled natural-human systems including their robustness and resilience to external and internal change; 2) apply the theory to, and test it against, the introduction, persistence, and dynamics of Polynesians on four Pacific Islands; and 3) explore how the development and application of the theory might support further advances in our understanding of diversity and complexity and their interactions with ecosystem management.

This project will help us to understand how and why humans succeed or fail to live sustainably within their environment. The research examines four French Polynesian islands where humans arrived about one thousand years ago and lived sustainably on some islands but not on others. Historical and current data will be used to help develop a clearer picture of the social and ecological changes that have taken place since the islands were first occupied. The project team will build and test sophisticated computer models of humans interacting with wild and managed ecosystems. The data and models will help more fully describe and explain fundamental properties such as the resources required by human populations and the ability of ecosystems to provide food and shelter for humans over hundreds of years. They will also highlight interactions between ecosystem services and the human use and exploitation of the islands' resources. Such knowledge is critical to understanding the role of humans with respect to ecosystems and environments well beyond these islands. The project will provide fundamental knowledge about how humans can interact more sustainably and beneficially with a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This work will also demonstrate how environmental and social sciences such as ecology, hydrology, oceanography, archaeology, demography and economics can be integrated to push forward the frontiers of interdisciplinary science. Such advances are vital for addressing critical problems at the intersection of social and natural sciences including resource overconsumption, climate disruption and the collapse of civilizations.

This award supports the scientific workforce development activities of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in complex adaptive systems. These activities include workshops and working groups, the visiting scientist program and the Complex Systems Summer School. SFI is a private, non-profit independent research and education institution that occupies a unique place in the academic landscape. It is dedicated to long-term, creative, trans-disciplinary research across the physical, computational, biological and social sciences, focusing on complex adaptive systems. This support will expand the inclusion of the broader scientific community in the activities at SFI, maintain the robustness of the workforce development activities, and allow for discovering and communicating to a broad audience the common fundamental principles in complex physical, computational, biological, and social systems. The award will permit SFI to explore new research areas through workshops and working groups, to expand the breadth of its international scientific community, and to provide support for its educational activities.

The workshop,"Convergent Paths towards Universality in Complex Systems", will bring together scientists from very diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including psychologists, physicists, ecologists, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, information theorists, and others to articulate a convergence approach to explore the recent discovery of universal or near-universal properties of complex systems. The two-day workshop, to be held in the Washington D.C. area will address universality in four primary areas: Information Processing and Collective Computation, Adaptive Dynamics, Scaling and Interactions and Energetics. The workshop will contribute new perspectives on universality and will be an important and necessary step in the identification of further research necessary for discovery in these converging fields. The results of this project will achieve broad impact through the workshop's contributions to increased insight into universality. Results of the workshop will be distributed broadly to a wide range of audiences through peer-reviewed reports, media announcements, and lectures at SFI's workshops and schools attended by academics, policymakers, and other stakeholders. The workshop will also be videotaped for dissemination via the SFI website and YouTube channel as well as for use in SFI sponsored training. Invited workshop participants will include a very diverse range of participants in order to achieve diversity across a number of dimensions, including faculty rank, gender, underrepresented groups and institutional diversity. This approach will facilitate the scientific and professional development of early career researchers as well as the inclusion of scientists from traditionally underrepresented groups.

The workshop will bring together research leaders across diverse disciplines for intensive discussions aimed at exploration of common mechanisms underlying a range of features of complex systems. The recent widespread adoption of information-theory, scaling theory, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and the theory of computation, in fields that go far beyond their disciplinary origins suggests a significant convergence that points toward universality. This meeting will focus on the most successful examples of unification and seek to explore their basis and generalization. The meeting will identify tools, models and theories that extend beyond the boundaries of single disciplines, and thereby provide significant improvements through novel approaches, to progress within any given field.

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.

Many challenges in the world today – disease dynamics, collective and artificial intelligence, belief propagation, financial risk, national security, and ecological sustainability – exceed traditional academic disciplinary boundaries and demand a rigorous understanding of complexity. Complexity science, as pioneered at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and elsewhere, aims to quantitatively describe and understand the adaptive, evolvable and thus hard-to-predict behaviors of complex systems. One of the greatest lessons of 2020 is how critical this kind of understanding is to our society. We require a scientific workforce capable of integrating theory from biology, social sciences, physics and computer science with mathematical and computational modeling. Despite the centrality of complex systems and the importance of diverse perspectives and international collaboration in addressing the challenges facing our world, purposeful opportunities for PhD student training in these areas are sparse. SFI’s 14-day Complexity Advanced Studies Institutes (ASIs)—based centrally in the EU research network—fills this gap by introducing 18 US PhD students and their EU counterparts to the theory and practice of complex systems modeling in an internationally collaborative setting. After completing Complexity ASIs, participants serve as catalysts in the US scientific workforce, advancing the use of complex systems science to solve imminent problems facing our society and the world.

Complexity ASIs leverage the transdisciplinary ideas, expert faculty, proven training capacity and international reach of SFI, in collaboration with four leading complex systems research institutions in Germany, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands (GAINs) and located centrally in Vienna, Austria. The Complexity-GAINs partnership expands the faculty’s expertise and perspective, gives students access to influential international research partners, and strengthens collaboration among institutions. Students gain foundational knowledge and practice in modeling complex systems of interest through a combination of lectures, discussions, skills tutorials, peer-group problem-solving and hands-on mentored research. The annual program, operating over three years, focuses on different systems each year—intelligent systems, social-behavioral systems, ecosystems—and provides students with broadly applicable tools to recognize and define the universal properties of all complex systems. Following participation in Complexity-GAINs ASIs, PhD students are equipped to (1) describe and better predict the behavior of a complex system through mathematical or computational modeling; and (2) leverage interdisciplinary, international partnerships to achieve shared research and applied goals. The international nature of the program is essential to both goals and will ensure that early-career US researchers are prepared to address complex systems beyond disciplinary and geographic boundaries. An associated outcome of the program is the establishment of a complex systems curriculum and accompanying instructional content for broad dissemination.

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.