Research to Impact Collaboratives

 Research to Impact Collaboratives – COMPASS 2025 Team:

Samar Sabie, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

Cansu Ekmekcioglu,  Assistant Professor, McMaster University

Priyanka Verma, PhD Student, University of Toronto

Siddhant Shinde, PhD Student, University of Toronto

Manohar Swaminathan, Senior Principal researcher, Microsoft Research India

Goals of the RICs

Building on their success in COMPASS 2024, RICs will continue to provide a platform for the COMPASS community to collaborate with multiple stakeholders, including academia, industry, NGOs, social enterprises, and impact funding agencies. The aim is to create measurable impact, broadly aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. RICs will facilitate multi-year partnerships to translate research efforts into tangible impacts and uncover new research challenges. The RICs aim to address the current silos and gaps in the landscape of computing for societal impact as follows:

  1. Academic researchers focus on core research problems and publish in venues like COMPASS. However, the emphasis on novelty, technical depth, and pilot demonstrations or PoCs means there are no incentives or resources for academics to translate their research into real-world impact on SDGs at scale.
  2. NGOs and social enterprises actively pursuing SDG-related projects often lack the resources or incentives to publish their work in academic conferences, and such work is rarely recognized as novel by current conference benchmarks.
  3. Successful enterprises and NGOs create significant impact on the ground but often do not share their learnings with the academic community to address new research challenges encountered in the field.
  4. Academics and practitioners may collaborate to address genuine issues on the ground, but these partnerships are often short-term and may not continue after a paper is published. Building even short-term partnerships requires significant time investment from academics, which is usually not recognized or incentivized by current academic metrics. Early career researchers are particularly disadvantaged in building such partnerships.
  5. Long-term collaborations with practitioners in the global south are challenging for researchers in the global north. There is a need to connect researchers and practitioners across this divide. Most partnerships are established through informal networks, limiting the diversity of possible collaborations.
  6. Funding is critical for scaling technology solutions to deliver positive impact. Academics may not have access to such funds since research funding is tied to novelty rather than deployment. NGOs receive funding to deploy and scale well-tested solutions but not for exploring new solutions. Impact funding agencies typically rely on responses to their CFPs and lack visibility into emerging solutions in this space.

RIC Submission Requirements:

  1. At least three different stakeholders (academia, non-profit, industry, government, impact-agency) must be part of a proposed RIC with commitment by one person from each organization to register and attend in person at COMPASS 2025 and conduct the workshop.
  2. Work with the identified collaborators to arrive at the goals, agenda, the duration [half-day (4-hours) or a quarter-day (2-hours) workshop] and structure of the workshop to be organized and conducted at COMPASS 2025. 
    1. You  may refer to this draft proposal submission. 
  3. Proposals must be submitted by email to samar.sabie@utoronto.ca by March 31st, 2025.
  4. Notifications will be sent to the lead proposers by April 15th, 2025 to give participants as much time as possible to prepare the logistics.
  5. Throughout the RIC meeting at COMPASS 2025 and extended interactions beyond, collaborators of confirmed RICs are encouraged to produce a white paper, research goals and focus for the next year of collaboration, vision document, or similar document capturing the essence of the RIC and its goals. Any such document submitted by September 1st, 2025 (approximately one month after COMPASS 2025) will be included in the conference’s non-archived publications and published on the COMPASS website. These documents will be highlighted at COMPASS 2026 to attract further collaboration interests, particularly from the location of the next COMPASS conference.