Conference: Understanding Regional Opportunities and Partnerships to Drive American Competitiveness

This award is to sponsor the "Conference: Understanding Regional Opportunities and Partnerships to Drive American Competitiveness". The conference convenes representatives from academia, government, nonprofits, policy makers, various non-profit funders, entrepreneurs, NGOs, and publishers to discuss and disseminate their findings on innovation, entrepreneurship, and use-inspired translational research necessary to address society's grand challenges. An essential component of the conference's workshops is the role and importance of the social sciences and humanities when developing and optimizing the different technologies. The 2025 conference will particularly focus upon intersection of artificial intelligence innovations, the issues of trustworthiness and ethics, and advancing societal good. The event has several key objectives, such as creating/strengthening public-private partnerships that will advance and accelerate economic development through use-inspired research. Another key objective is to identify opportunities for researchers to contribute to the successful development and implementation of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies that are also ethical and human-centered. As part of this conference, participants will expand communities-of-practice and identify models that measure the societal impact and economic growth in regional ecosystems through collaboration and engagement. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.