Research and Infrastructure Challenges for Applications and Services in the Year 2021

The Applications and Services in the Year 2021 workshop was successfully organized on January 27-28, 2016 in Washington DC through funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the workshop was to foster discussions that bring together applications researchers in multidisciplinary areas, and developers/operators of research infrastructures at both national, regional, university and city levels. Discussions were organized to identify grand challenge applications and obtain the community voice and consensus on the key issues relating to applications and services that might be delivered by advanced infrastructures in the decade beginning in 2020. The timing and organization for the workshop is significant because today’s digital infrastructure is undergoing deep technological changes and new paradigms are rapidly taking shape in both the core and edge domains that pose fundamental challenges. The key outcomes of the discussions were targeted to enhance the quality of peoples’ lives while addressing important national priorities, leveraging today’s cutting edge applications such as the Internet of Things, Big Data Analytics, Robotics, The Industrial Internet, and Immersive Virtual/Augmented Reality. This report summarizes the workshop efforts to bring together diverse groups for delivering targeted short/long talks, sharing latest advances, and identifying gaps that exist in the community for ‘research’ and ‘infrastructure’ needs that require future NSF funding.