ACADEMIA

The Advanced Research and Technology Collaboratory for the Americas (ARTCA / http://www.artcaonline.org) Summit on Advanced Computing in the Americas, held March 11-12, 2010, at the Costa Rican Embassy and the ACCESS Center in Washington, D.C., brought together leading research centers, government agencies, and foundations focused on developing multi-institutional, inter-disciplinary, international collaborations to address grand challenges facing the hemisphere.  Organized by the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) and the Costa Rica USA Foundation (CRUSA), the summit kicked off with a reception honoring Luis Diego Escalante, Costa Rican ambassador to the United States, for his work promoting hemispheric collaboration, followed by a day of presentations and discussions aimed at finding collaborative research and application possibilities across the Americas. 

“The summit sought to ask how we can we frame and develop the next generation of advanced computational technologies to positively impact communities on the ground, without regard to physical, geographical, institutional, disciplinary, and organizational boundaries” said ARTCA principal investigator Kevin Franklin, the executive director of I-CHASS.

"Resources are scarcer than ever, the pressure on our ecosystems is at a level never before seen, and society’s problems have grown more complex.  In this new scheme, no single country or organization can expect to try and effectively resolve these problems on its own.  Collaboration is now more important than ever, but more than that, new models of collaboration are called for," said Hermann L. Faith, Executive Director of CRUSA.

A significant aspect of ARTCA’s efforts focused on discussions of building the computational competency and infrastructure across the Americas regardless of domain content. “Computers and computational capabilities are increasingly assisting all aspects of not only scientific research and development, but literally all other aspects of the human environment -across the globe,” stated Danny Powell, executive director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. “Health care, the environment, energy, security, manufacturing, agriculture, entertainment, and education; nearly every aspect of our lives are being more and more integrated with computer infrastructure and capabilities.”

The summit concluded with the signing of an letter of intent between CRUSA, I-CHASS, NCSA, and the Social Security Administration of Costa Rica to design and implement an emergency management system that will enable Costa Rican hospitals to be viewed as a single virtual organization by the National Emergency Operations Center. This partnership will assess existing infrastructure and design an emergency management system for Costa Rica that can be scaled throughout the Americas. “ARTCA offers incredible new opportunities for interdisciplinary and international collaboration in research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences,” communications researcher and University of Illinois professor M. Scott Poole stated. “The wide array of institutions and funders represented at the ARTCA kickoff conference as well as the Emergency Management system project is a great illustration of this.”

Representatives attended from the following organizations, including:

1. •Alaska Federation of Natives (www.nativefederation.org)
   

2. •Amigos of Costa Rica (www.amigosofcostarica.org)
   

3. •Caja Costarricense del Seguro Social  (www.ccss.sa.cr)
   

4. •California State University, Los Angeles (www.calstatela.edu)
   

5. •CLARA (www.redclara.net)
   

6. •CONCIT (www.conicit.go.cr)
   

7. •Costa Rica USA Foundation (www.crusa.cr)
   

8. •Embassy of Costa Rica
   

9. •Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples (www.yorku.ca/tubman/Home)
   

10. •Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (www.ichass.illinois.edu)
    

11. •Inter-American Development Bank (www.iadb.org)
    

12. •InterAmerican Foundation (www.iaf.gov)
    

13. •Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica (LNCC), Brazil (www.lncc.br)
    

14. •Mexico-USA Foundation for Science (www.fumec.org)
    

15. •Ministry of Health, Costa Rica
    

16. •National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) of Costa Rica (www.inbio.ac.cr)
    

17. •National Center for Supercomputing Applications (www.ncsa.illinois.edu)
    

18. •National Endowment for the Humanities (www.neh.gov)
    

19. •National Institutes of Health (www.nih.gov)
    

20. •National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov)
    

21. •National University (www.nu.edu)
    

22. •Organization of American States (www.oas.org)
    

23. •RENCI (www.renci.org)
    

24. •Texas Advanced Computing Center (www.tacc.utexas.edu)
    

25. •Universidad EAFIT, Columbia (www.eafit.edu.co)
    

26. •University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (www.illinois.edu)
    

27. •Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (www.uvg.edu.gt)
    

28. •Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (www.unam.mx)
    

A full report on the summit is available for download (.pdf format).