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c OSCAR connects and enables people by leveraging Rhode Island͛s shared resources
(physical, human and natural assets) to address regional challenges that no one
organization or institution could tackle alone.
c Urgency and complexity. Societies problems are immediate, and they are too complex.
Most institutions, organizations and geographical areas are not equipped to cope
effectively with these new challenges, and it requires a multi-stakeholder approach with
more advanced and accessible resources.
c OSCAR is an all-volunteer structure consisting of government, industry, academia and
social agencies across the region. Volunteers include world-class faculty, entrepreneurs,
companies, service agencies, artists, government officials, designers, technologist, etc.
c OSCAR provides a social framework called a Collaboratory. A Collaboratory is an open
and dynamic working group engaging creative minds across sectors, organizations,
disciplines in an action-oriented process that defines projects to address regional
challenges in broad topics such health, energy and environment, society and economy.
These projects are called pilots.
Pilots are small-scale data-driven projects that allow participants to leverage existing
Rhode Island assets (expertise, tools, technologies, services, etc) to create or gather data
to drive future decisions about investments, policies, funding or growth.
c OSCAR is transformative framework to address challenges now. Here are current OSCAR
activities that demonstrate its capability and scalability:
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  ºOSCAR will launch the Energy and Environment
Collaboratory GKD pilot in January 2011, and we anticipate subsequent pilots from
each collaboratory will be announced over the next few months.
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 Through OSCAR, IBM and Brown collaborated with across
academic research enterprise to access a need for high performance computing to
accelerate research, collaboration, funding opportunities and innovation. This process
yielded an investment by Brown and IBM to build a statewide supercomputer resource
that would provide access to the entire state.
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   º  OSCAR
supported OSHEAN in its successful $21.7M effort to bring affordable broadband
capacity to OSHEAN members and the public they serve and contribute 210 jobs to the
region.
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 OSCAR convened two statewide technical
working groups with the Center for Clinical Translational Sciences to build a data
sharing platform to accelerate innovation in clinical translational research and to
support the submission in October 2010 of the $20Million CTSA application.