C.5. Knowledge Transfer, Education, and Outreach

This project will sponsor an Education and Outreach (E&O) program with four primary goals: (1) to transfer the technology developed under this project to end-users of earthquake information; (2) to cross-educate advanced students and postdocs in the fields of geoscience and computer-science; (3) to make the general public aware of the benefits of applying advanced information technology to the problems of earthquake risk; and (4) to use public interest in earthquake information to attract beginning students into geoscience and computer science. Because SCEC services a Southern California population of 20 million with an Hispanic plurality, a specific objective of our E&O program will be to engage young Hispanic Americans in the intellectual challenges of earthquake information technology.

The SCEC/IT Partnership comprises organizations with powerful, nationally recognized E&O programs, and we will use these organizational resources to achieve our E&O goals. SCEC maintains a large, very successful E&O program to transfer the knowledge gained by SCEC researchers to end-user communities, to educate students at all levels, and to engage the general public in earthquake-related issues. SCEC also coordinates its activities with its partners in earthquake engineering and risk management, including the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering (CUREE) and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center. IRIS's E&O program is designed to enhance seismology and Earth Science education in K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and in adult education at the national level. The UCSD NPACI program maintains an E&O program to apply advanced technology in support of human resource development, increase participation of underrepresented groups, and promote national programs in education.

The technology-transfer goal will be achieved primarily through the SCEC E&O program. We have specifically budgeted two tutorial workshops per year to make the current results of this project available to the end-user communities and to get their feedback on our development activities. The locations of these workshops will be distributed at various SCEC institutions to ensure participation by end-users throughout California.

This project will provide an excellent means for the cross-training of students and postdocs in geoscience and computer science. A structure based on research teams comprising representatives of both the IT and the geoscience communities (see Management Plan) will ensure this cross-training for young scientists directly involved in the project, and our annual meetings and tutorial workshops will extend this educational endeavor to a much larger group. We will also use the SCEC Community Modeling Environment as a case study in two USC courses, CS 541 (Artificial Intelligence Planning) and CS 598 (Knowledge Based Systems/Knowledge Representation and Reasoning). Dr. Y. Gil, a senior scientist on this project, is the faculty member currently responsible for both courses. The courses will be revamped by using the framework described in this proposal as a practical sandbox for course projects, and their structure will be revised so that they can taken by both geophysics and computer science students.

To expose less advanced students from various disciplines to the excitement of this research, we have included funds for 5 undergraduates as part of the USC budget. These students will participate in the SCEC Summer Interns Program, which matches students from around the country with advisors who supervise summer research projects. We will use these funds specifically to recruit students from computer science and related disciplines, and we will specifically seek out and recruit students who are Hispanic American or from other underrepresented groups.

The output of the proposed project will include many products of general interest that can be used to improve public understanding of earthquakes (e.g., 4D visualizations of earthquake and ground-motion simulations). These products will find extensive use in SCEC and IRIS's excellent compendium of curricular and on-line educational materials, such as the Electronic Encyclopedia of Earthquakes (E³). E³ is an NSF-sponsored venture involving SCEC, IRIS, and CUREE to develop a digital library collection of earthquake information in partnership with the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE).

The proposed project will produce new methodologies and analysis products of potentially great utility to other technical groups outside of Southern California earthquake science. The inclusion of the USGS and IRIS in the SCEC/IT partnership will facilitate this technology transfer. The USGS will take the lead in applying the information infrastructure developed in this project to real-time operations and post-earthquake emergency response. The USGS will also ensure that the results of this ITR effort are exported to other regions of earthquake risk, as well as to other USGS activities. IRIS will ensure that the methodology developed for the study of Southern California earthquakes can be transported to other regions and used to facilitate the NSF-sponsored EarthScope Project [63].

Section C.6: Management Plan

Proposal: Table of Contents

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