Introduction
Background
The National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the new program, Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN NSF 21-582) in 2018. The program has expanded since then awarding 40 research teams thus far. The proposed conference intends to bring together the awardees (PIs, Co-PIs, and other key personnel), other researchers interested in this program as well as policy makers and industry professionals working in the field of illicit supply chains to facilitate collaborative research.
Intellectual Merits
The proposed conference is one of a few conferences that bring together domain experts in industry and the government and academic researchers in various specialized fields to explore new analytical and engineering methods used to detect and disrupt illicit supply networks. Most of the conferences in this field are currently organized by non-academic institutions with their primary objective being knowledge sharing regarding the status-quo of trafficking and crime networks. The proposed conference breaks this tradition by promoting the integration of the two different sets of professionals, i.e., domain experts and engineers, with the shared topical interests, i.e., trafficking and other illicit supply networks. If successful, the conference could serve as a platform for future convergence research in the area of illicit supply networks.
Broader Impacts
The proposed conference could generate potential impacts through several pathways. First, the conference could establish the novel and unique novel foundation for future communications among law enforcement agencies and their contractors, policy makers, and engineers and domain experts in academia. Second, the diverse backgrounds of the participants as well as possible collaborations among them could subsequently facilitate the development of a practical tool/s or an analytical framework/s that are readily useful for law-enforcement. On the educational level, we will accommodate students at three different levels, i.e., high school, undergraduate, and graduate level students, to expose them to transdisciplinary research for 1.5 days. The proposed PIs have a successful track record of developing and implementing a summer research program for a cohort of high school students. Among the cohort of the students, about a dozen of them have volunteered to participate in the proposed conference as note takers at the round tables and the breakout sessions. We plan to adopt the “nested mentoring” approach where each team consists of students at all three levels, and senior students supervise/mentor junior students while collaboratively achieving the tasks. The approach will facilitate learning and mentoring skills at varying levels while all students will be immersed to the convergence research environment at early stage of their learning. Finally, if successful, the format of the proposed conference, e.g., the participant mix, panel and round table discussions could be emulated to facilitate similar collaborations in other fields. Lessons learned from the conference will be informative for any future conferences on this type.