Working Groups

A small subset of Catalysis Meetings grows into longer-term, larger efforts called Working Groups. Working Groups consist of small teams that span disciplines and meet repeatedly (at least two times) over one to two years.

Stakeholder Integration

These groups often include entrepreneurs and practitioners from agencies who help translate the science into on-the-ground solutions.

Location

While the initial coordination occurs on the main campus, Working Groups may be hosted at CMAST (Morehead City, N.C.) or the NC State European Center in Prague to provide focused, collegial settings aimed at stimulating creative thinking away from daily distractions.

The following table summarizes the typical scale and duration of these interactions based on international synthesis center standards.

Meeting Type	Participants	Duration	Primary Location	No. per year
Catalysis Meeting	20 - 30	3 – 5 days	NC State Main Campus	5
Working Group	10 - 15	4 – 5 days (per session)	NC State Main Campus, CMAST or NC State European Center in Prague	4
Long-Table Discussion	8 - 15	1 - 2 hours	Often, NC State Main Campus	10

Note: Long-table discussions do not require additional funding beyond food. A single Working Group meeting typically costs between $15,000 and $50,000, depending upon the degree to which additional staffing is built up for general services associated with think and do tanks and the degree to which the events align with OUIP priorities (and hence staffing).

Note: Optimal time frames for utilizing the NC State European Center include: Spring break (dorms full, but could use hotels); the last week of April (dorms available); the first two weeks in May (dorms available); and mid-December through winter break (dorms available).

Core Support: The Data Science and AI Academy (DSA)

NC State’s Data Science and AI Academy (DSA) serves as a critical enabler for the OUIP synthesis initiative by providing the technical infrastructure for data curation, synthesis, and AI implementation. Our think and do tanks will leverage DSA efforts and abilities across meetings. In some cases, this will include efforts to curate data, synthesize and activate data. In more complex cases, the DSA facilitates the employment of AI and machine learning to accelerate data-intensive discovery and automate analytical model building, ensuring that synthesis efforts can handle the scale and complexity of modern interdisciplinary datasets. The resulting data sets and products will represent the iconic examples for the topics being considered and will serve as a point of reference locally and globally. DSA can also pair individual meeting participants with experts to help them find, prepare, analyze, understand, and visualize data that transcend the core mission of a particular think tank.

Core Approach: Art as Disruption and Way of Seeing

At NC State, art is fundamental to interdisciplinary science and engineering. It is, similarly, integral to our think and do tank approaches. We expect all catalysis and Working Group meetings and most long-table discussions to incorporate art. This can take many forms, artists as key collaborators, artists in the role of depiction, artists as disruptors, etc…  Examples employed to date include having an opera singer start a meeting in song and then participate in the discussion, having artists depict a meeting and protagonist, centering meetings on art challenges and using artistic or culinary methods as an approach to jump over scholarly hurdles.

Strategic Focus and Calls for Proposals–Signature Capabilities

The content of these meetings will focus on practicable dimensions of grand challenges, particularly those for which the scholarly, industry and stakeholder expertise of the region can be leveraged. Those grand challenges relate to risk management, climate change, sustainability, the future AI (and use of AI) and One Health. Externally-funded meetings can be more topically wide-ranging. One externally-funded Working Group is in development this year, focused on the evolution of consciousness.