CENTRA 8 - Taiwan

Cultivating Cross-Culture Collaborations: Opportunities, Challenges, and Examples
(an earlier program referred to this session as The Wisdom of Gandalf)
SEAIP. 2025 February 23. 9 am to 10:30 am

• Introduction
• Each panelist comments on charge (no more than five minutes)
• Discussion with questions from the audience

Goal of the Session

• Identify approaches and practices to enhance cross-cultural collaborations.

Note:

• The next session is a discussion on SEAIP’s future. Ideas raised in this session might provoke recommendations in the next. This can also inform the panel session on February 24, “The Era of Impact-based Collaborative Research.”

Charge to PanelEach panelist will be invited to address the first two points (and more if they’d like):

• Describe your experience or involvement in cross-cultural collaborations or projects.
• What experience-based advice can you give the audience for new or existing cross-cultural collaborations to strengthen the activities? What are the challenges and opportunities?
• Bonus 1: What is your favorite Gandalf quote (and how it applies to their experience)?
• Bonus 2: Are there similar icons as Gandalf in your culture (literatures/tales/etc.)? Today?

Panelists

• Hen-Biau King, former Director General, Taiwan Forest Research Institute, Taiwan
• Jose Fortes, Professor, University of Florida, USA
• Beth Plale, Michael A and Laurie Burns McRobbie Bicentennial Professor of Computer Engineering, Indiana University, USA
• Shinji Shimojo, Professor, Aomori University, and President, Global Environment Centre Foundation (GEC), Japan
• Uwe Wössner, Head, Visualization Department, High Performance Computing Center, U Stuttgart, Germany
• Mohd Zamir Pakhuruddin, Associate Professor, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
• Ummi Azizah Rachmawati, Dean, Faculty of Information Technology, Universitas YARSI, Indonesia
• Hui Ping Tsai, Associate Professor, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan

There is a growing global awareness of the impact that could be created by cross-fertilizing applied research projects likely to have large potential community impacts. Instead of research groups competing to be the first to publish a scientific or technical innovation, a collaborative wholistic approach is designed to bring multiple synergistic intelligences to bear on real-life difficult problems. The success of this process is not guaranteed, but apears to be enhanced when scientists, practitioners, and beneficiaries involved have varied backrounds, assumptions, and areas of expertise. This type of process is being encouraged in the United States by the National Science Foundation's new Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships Directorate, and is having impacts throughout the other NSF directorates. International collaborations should, by this reasoning, be especially beneficial because additional viewpoints are encouraged by varying languague, culture, training, expectation, and experience. Some nascent positive directions include (a) formal, supported participation by potential beneficiaries; (b) place-based collaborative innovation with community commitment; (c) early identification and focus on the most intractable portions of the task; (d) a willingness to pursue and adopt multiple potential solutions simultaneously; and (e) a strong and evolving sense of priority, urgency, and collaboration. It seems highly unlikely that the US NSF has a monopoly on this shift to more collaborative and applied research on pressing societal issues. What can CENTRA members contribute to this vitalily important international discussion?