"Workshop on: Designing cyberinfrastructure to enable US-China collaboration in tobacco research
March 27-29, 2008
Beijing
Workshop organizers:
Brief Introduction to Workshop (in Chinese)
The invitation-only workshop “Designing cyberinfrastructure to enable US-China collaboration in tobacco research” brings together leading researchers in tobacco control and research with key researchers who are developing and understanding the use of cyberinfrastructure tools to enable research and collaboration within geographically distributed or co-located scientific communities. The workshop will acquaint the tobacco research community with the potential of cyberinfrastructure tools to enhance high performance computing, data-integration, and collaboration within the tobacco research communities in the US and China. The workshop will also help the community developing cyberinfrastructure tools to identify real problems confronting the US-China research communities and develop solutions that are responsive to these challenges. Many of the invitees to this workshop are quite familiar with one another’s research and some have ongoing collaborations. Hence the success of this workshop will be assessed in terms of the creating new collaborations as well as strengthening existing partnerships.
The workshop will jointly convene with the US-China Infectious Disease Informatics and BioSurveillance Workshop (PI: Daniel Zheng) http://isd.arizona.edu/idb08/. The workshop will also serve as the venue for the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science Exhibit (www.scimaps.org) organized by Katy Borner.
Intellectual merit: The workshop will explore how cyberinfrastructure can be used to help advance basic science by joint collaborations between US and China scholars involved in a wide range of issues ranging from smoking prevention to cessation and from tobacco surveillance and epidemiology to policy and evaluation. The workshop will also provide scholars developing and understanding the use of cyberinfrastructure to extend their suite of tools to be more responsive to the special needs of the tobacco research community.
Broader impacts: Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death on the planet. Tobacco use is very high in China (66% men, 3% women). The prevalence appears to be increasing among women, and there is very major secondhand exposure to tobacco as a result of smoking by men. The number of smokers in China exceeds the total population of the US. In addition, number of deaths in China due to tobacco use is increasing dramatically. As a result of signing the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), China must address tobacco control. This workshop will be an important milestone in enabling researchers, educators, and policy makers, to help China and the rest of the world take dramatic steps to respond to this preventable crisis.
