KI researchers awarded funding

Monday, September 19, 2016

Congratulations to Knowledge Integration faculty members on recent funding support for their research.

Rob Gorbet and the Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG) have been awarded a $2,476,738 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant for their "Living architecture systems".

The LASG is a North American and European network of over 40 academic and industrial partners, led by Waterloo, exploring the future of responsive architecture. The foci of Rob's involvement are two-fold. First, in the development and implementation of engineering systems to promote intelligent and empathic interactions with the architectural space.  Second, in inter-disciplinary working methods: studying and facilitating within the partnership itself, and developing related curriculum for grade school classrooms.

John McLevey received the $150,000 Early Researcher Award (ERA), for his work using new computational methods to better understand the development of free/libre open source (FLOSS) software in massive inter-organizational collaboration networks. Learn more in this article about John's ERA. He has also been awarded a $67,790 SSHRC Insight Development Grant for his work on "Remaking the Boundaries of Open and Proprietary Science: A Longitudinal Study of Biomedical Research and Development Networks in Canada".

Vanessa Schweizer has been awarded a $150,000 Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery grant for her work on "Uncovering 'perfect storms' among possible events affecting complex systems".

Vanessa is currently researching long-term socioeconomic trends in countries at different stages of economic development (e.g. industrialized versus least-developed), which may pose challenges for adapting to climate change or mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Such trends are the result of complex systems that include relationships between policy, culture, and technology. 'Perfect storms' refer to particular conditions that are stressors on these systems resulting in dysfunctional outcomes (for example, poverty traps). Her research program aims to illuminate these risks so that they can be better avoided.

Katie Plaisance, in collaboration with John McLevey have been awarded a $59,302 SSHRC Insight Development Grant for their work on "Increasing the Impact of Philosophy of Science in Scientific Domains".