Mission, Vision & Strategy

Mission

The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) will foster the development of a diverse, multidisciplinary community of scientists, teachers, and students, and a cyberinfrastructure that facilitates significant advances in the understanding of plant science through the application of computational thinking and approaches to Grand Challenge problems in plant biology.

Vision and Strategy

The iPlant Collaborative

VisionBy, For, and Of The Community: A workshop breakout discussion focusing on Education, Outreach and Training at Biosphere 2 (photo: T. Lee)   The iPlant Collaborative (iPlant) will foster the development of a diverse, multi-disciplinary community of scientists, teachers, and students, and a cyberinfrastructure that facilitates significant advances in the understanding of plant science by this community through the application of computational thinking and approaches to Grand Challenge problems in plant biology and computer science.
Strategy
The iPlant Collaborative will achieve this Vision through a number of strategic efforts that include the following objectives:

1. Foster the formation and development of Grand Challenge Projects and Project Teams that cover a diverse variety of plant biology and computer science disciplines.
2. Adopt and create the best and most appropriate cyberinfrastructure (CI) to build a plant science-focused CI system ideally suited for existing and future plant science questions, data, and computational tools.
3. Promote computational thinking and approaches within Grand Challenge Teams and the entire plant science research and education community by stimulating collaborations, developing appropriate tools, and supporting training from K-12 through higher academic institutions.

Vision and Strategy for Areas of Focus Within iPlant

• Community Interactions and Synthesis Activities
• Cyberinfrastructure Development
• Education
• Social Sciences

 

Community Interactions and Synthesis Activities

Vision  
iPlant will:

• stimulate the formation of Grand Challenge (GC) teams from the research community;
• facilitate the identification of GC Problems in plant biology;
• foster cross-disciplinary collaborations to address GC Problems; and
• propagate the culture, training, and experience within the community required to address future GC Problems.

Strategy 
iPlant's Vision will be achieved through a series of strategic efforts designed to:

• bring the community of plant biologists and computational scientists together to form Grand Challenge teams;
• identify Grand Challenge Problems; and
• develop specific cyberinfrastructure tools to help address GC Problems.

These strategic efforts will include:

• holding GC Workshops;
• facilitating interactions of GC Project Teams with the iPlant engagement and developer teams;
• facilitating interactions within the research community; and
• promoting the use of cyberinfrastructure, computational thinking, and computational approaches to advance plant biology understanding.

Cyberinfrastructure Development

Vision
iPlant's cyberinfrastructure development team will create and advance collaborative technological infrastructure that supports and enhances the research and educational mission of the iPlant Collaborative.
Strategy
iPlant will develop the hardware and software infrastructure to support the needs of Discovery Environments and Grand Challenge teams. This vision will be accomplished though the development of world-class tools and services, including high performance computing, data analysis, mining and visualization, powerful user interface design (Web 2.0), network, workflow and educational tools, and applications to support remote collaboration and virtual organizations. The entire cyberinfrastructure will be sustainable, secure, and interoperable, driven by the requirements and needs of the Grand Challenge teams and the plant biology community.

Key to our CI vision is to actively engage the external community (academic, government, industry) in new opportunities. The ultimate goal is to provide the plant biology community with proactive Discovery Environments which enable scientific research and computational thinking and are adaptable to the changing research requirements of the community.

Education

Vision
The iPlant Collaborative will prepare scientists, educators, and students to develop and use computational approaches and cyberinfrastructure in innovative, interdisciplinary plant science research and teaching. Through public outreach, it will build understanding and appreciation for contemporary plant sciences research and cyberinfrastructure.
Strategy
iPlant will build a broad, multidisciplinary community of scientists, educators, and students across the plant, computational, and quantitative sciences to foster innovative learning and research. It will:

• focus on activities with national or regional impact;
• collaborate with the Grand Challenge project team members to help develop and implement their education, outreach, and training efforts;
• partner with other synergistic education, outreach, and training programs;
• train educators and scientists to use approaches from computer science, statistics, and mathematics to solve problems in plant biology;
• prepare scientists to develop novel methods and tools to advance plant science;
• provide opportunities for students to conduct authentic scientific research that requires computational approaches (data analysis, synthesis, modeling);
• adapt data sets, research tools, and Discovery Environments for use in inquiry learning and student research projects; and
• link scientists who have data and research projects with audiences who would like to participate in data analysis and synthesis.

Social Sciences

Vision
The Social Science Team will develop an understanding of how the adoption and diffusion of iPlant-related tools and techniques to support scientific research is enabled and how it influences the collaborative nature of scientific discovery, as well as our ability to study scientific discovery.
Strategy
The Social Science Team will:

• involve social scientists from diverse disciplines to identify interesting social science questions associated with the development and use of cyberinfrastructure;
• facilitate data collection efforts to address those questions, and analyze and interpret the data;
• disseminate the research results back to the iPlant Collaborative to enhance its activities; and
• disseminate research results to the larger research community.

The team will:

• coordinate data collection;
• oversee the protection of human subjects;
• interact with the other iPlant teams in order to understand the social impact of iPlant on the plant science and computational communities; and
• review and integrate prior research that is relevant to iPlant and share that with the iPlant and community members as appropriate.