The DoD strives for superiority in a complex operational environment composed of heterogeneous and ever-evolving pieces such as sensors and processing hardware, software, and wired and wireless communications infrastructure. To achieve superiority in this dynamic environment, the DoD invests in fully networked and maximally-capable sensors and platforms at the cutting edge of performance. Software has emerged as a key enabler of capability and flexibility in DoD systems. Software is essential to providing a vast range of military capabilities by playing a fundamental role [1] that deepens, broadens, links, and integrates diverse system elements.
A pervasive DoD challenge is the production of software that provides the Warfighter superior and affordable military capability in an environment where hardware and sensor technology is rapidly advancing and systems' performance demands are ever-increasing. The Government Accountability Office has identified the increasing scope of software development as a contributing factor to poor acquisition program outcome [2]. OASD(R&E) has identified the need for advanced software engineering technology to enhance the producibility of software in this environment with the goal of speeding the delivery of affordable capability to the Warfighter and sustaining it.
The Challenge seeks designs that lead to the acquisition of academic, technical, and employability skills through engaging simulated experiences in the hybrid reality continuum. For the purpose of this notice, ``hybrid reality continuum'' refers to the range of computer-generated simulations that extend from completely simulated
environments to environments that incorporate aspects of the real world. For the purpose of this Challenge, ``EdSim'' is broadly defined as computer-generated three-dimensional learning environments, including virtual, augmented, and mixed realities that draw upon or mimic real-world experiences and are designed to educate users.
This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages applications for developing and testing innovative theories and computational, mathematical, or engineering approaches to deepen our understanding of complex social behavior. This research will examine phenomena at multiple scales to address the emergence of collective behaviors that arise from individual elements or parts of a system working together. Emergence can also describe the functioning of a system within the context of its environment. Often properties we associate with a system itself are in actuality properties of the relationships and interactions between a system and its environment. This FOA will support research that explores the often complex and dynamic relationships among the parts of a system and between the system and its environment in order to understand the system as a whole.
The Information Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI), Rome Research Site, is soliciting white papers under this announcement for innovative technologies to enable the effective management of information for military operations.
Focus: The objective of this BAA is to develop and demonstrate middleware to bridge the tactical and enterprise domains, realizing decentralized IM services built upon client-based protocols for use at the tactical edge that can coexist and interoperate securely with the server-based IM services that are well-suited for deployment in enterprise-scale environments. To improve the exchange of information between enterprise and the tactical edge networks and applications, these services need to be capable of operating in contested/congested environments and be built upon disruption and fault tolerant techniques and technologies.
The research and development to be conducted under this BAA is focused on the following:
1) Interoperable hybrid centralized & decentralized IM services designed for mobile operations.
2) Gateways for the exchange of heterogeneous information across disparate networks.
3) Disruption tolerant information preservation, optimized delivery, and synchronization.
4) Demonstration of the utility of these capabilities in operationally relevant environments.
The program supports four main research thrusts that are envisioned to advance the goal of ubiquitous co-robots: scalability, customizability, lowering barriers to entry, and societal impact. Topics addressing scalability include how robots can collaborate effectively with multiple humans or other robots; how robots can perceive, plan, act, and learn in uncertain, real-world environments, especially in a distributed fashion; and how to facilitate large-scale, safe, robust and reliable operation of robots in complex environments. Customizability includes how to enable co-robots to adapt to specific tasks, environments, or people, with minimal modification to hardware and software; how robots can personalize their interactions with people; and how robots can communicate naturally with humans, both verbally and non-verbally. Topics in lowering barriers to entry should focus on lowering the barriers for conducting fundamental robotics research and research on integrated robotics application. This may include development of open-source co-robot hardware and software, as well as widely-accessible testbeds. Outreach or using robots in educational programs do not, by themselves, lower the barriers to entry for robotics research. Topics in societal impact include fundamental research to establish and infuse robotics into educational curricula, advance the robotics workforce through education pathways, and explore the social, economic, ethical, and legal implications of our future with ubiquitous collaborative robots.
The program supports four main research thrusts that are envisioned to advance the goal of ubiquitous co-robots: scalability, customizability, lowering barriers to entry, and societal impact. Topics addressing scalability include how robots can collaborate effectively with multiple humans or other robots; how robots can perceive, plan, act, and learn in uncertain, real-world environments, especially in a distributed fashion; and how to facilitate large-scale, safe, robust and reliable operation of robots in complex environments. Customizability includes how to enable co-robots to adapt to specific tasks, environments, or people, with minimal modification to hardware and software; how robots can personalize their interactions with people; and how robots can communicate naturally with humans, both verbally and non-verbally. Topics in lowering barriers to entry include development of open-source co-robot hardware and software, as well as widely-accessible testbeds. Topics in societal impact include fundamental research to establish and infuse robotics into educational curricula, advance the robotics workforce through education pathways, and explore the social, economic, ethical, and legal implications of our future with ubiquitous collaborative robots.
The program supports four main research themes that are envisioned to advance the goal of ubiquitous co-robots:scalability,customizability,lowering barriers to entry, andsocietal impact,includinghuman safety. Topics addressingscalabilityinclude how robots can collaborate effectively with orders of magnitude more humans or other robots than is handled by the current state of the art; how robots can perceive, plan, act, and learn in uncertain, real-world environments, especially in a distributed fashion; and how to facilitate large-scale, safe, robust and reliable operation of robots in complex environments.Customizabilityincludes how to enable co-robots to adapt to specific different tasks, environments, or people, with minimal modification to hardware and software; how robots can personalize their interactions with people; and how robots can communicate naturally with humans, both verbally and non-verbally. Topics inlowering barriers to entryshould focus on lowering the barriers for conducting fundamental roboticsresearchand research on integrated robotics application. This may include development of open-source co-robot hardware and software, as well as widely-accessible testbeds. Outreach or using robots in educational programs do not, by themselves, lower the barriers to entry for robotics research. Topics insocietal impactinclude fundamental research to establish and infuse robotics into educational curricula, advance the robotics workforce through education pathways, and explore the social, economic, ethical, security, and legal implications of our future with ubiquitous collaborative robots.
NIJ is interested to fund a single evaluator that will have the capabilities to assess the effectiveness of a few promising technologies that can enhance safety within K-12 schools. Evaluations should consider the school environment and use cases as well as the kinds of data that might be collected or used as a result of the technology intervention. Applicants are encouraged to explore technologies that have worked for use cases in other ecosystems that may translate well to the K-12 school environment.
* The frontiers of science-exploring nature's mysteries from the study of fundamental subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules that are the building blocks of the materials of our universe and everything in it to the DNA, proteins, and cells that are the building blocks of life. Each of the programs in SC supports research probing the most fundamental disciplinary questions.
* The 21st Century tools of science-providing the nation's researchers with 27 state-of-the-art national scientific user facilities - the most advanced tools of modern science - propelling the U.S. to the forefront of science, technology development and deployment through innovation.
* Science for energy and the environment―paving the knowledge foundation to spur discoveries and innovations for advancing the Department's mission in energy and environment. SC supports a wide range of funding modalities from single principal investigators to large team-based activities to engage in fundamental research on energy production, conversion, storage, transmission, and use, and on our understanding of the earth systems.
Through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, NSF seeks to integrate advances in technology with advances in what is known about how people learn to
better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology;
better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to shed light on learning, promoting learning, and designing learning environments; and
design new technologies for these purposes, and advance understanding of how to use those technologies and integrate them into learning environments so that their potential is fulfilled.
Of particular interest are technological advances that allow more personalized learning experiences, draw in and promote learning among those in populations not served well by current educational practices, allow access to learning resources anytime and anywhere, and provide new ways of assessing capabilities. It is expected that Cyberlearning research will shed light on how technology can enable new forms of educational practice and that broad implementation of its findings will result in a more actively-engaged and productive citizenry and workforce.
The goal of this activity is to foster novel, transformative, multidisciplinary approaches that address the use of large data sets to create actionable knowledge for improving STEM teaching and learning environments (formal and informal) in the medium term, and to revolutionize learning in the longer term. These approaches will involve the work of learning scientists, STEM disciplinary experts, computer scientists, statisticians, database experts and educational researchers who design and study learning environments.
NSF is interested in supporting activities by the NSF Cyberinfrastructure community in the analysis of existing benchmarks, and in the development of new benchmarks, that measure real-world performance and effectiveness of large-scale computing systems for science and engineering discovery. Research, development, and use of performance benchmarks in high-performance computing (HPC) has been active for over 20 years, as evidenced by the development of LINPACK and the emergence of the TOP500 list in the early 1990s, followed by the development of the HPC Challenge Benchmark and the current HPCG effort (http://tiny.cc/hpcg). There have been efforts to provide benchmarks that include real applications, such as the SPEC High Performance Computing Benchmarks (http://spec.org/benchmarks.html#hpg), the Blue Waters SPP suite (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/assets/pdf/news/BW1year_apps.pdf), and the NERSC SSP (https://www.nersc.gov/users/computational-systems/nersc-8-system-cori/nersc-8-procurement/trinity-nersc-8-rfp/nersc-8-trinity-benchmarks/ssp/). Recent efforts have sought to broaden the set of relevant benchmarks to more effectively cover performance under different application environments such as data-intensive analysis (e.g., Graph500). Energy efficiency has also emerged in recent years as a relevant and increasingly important area of measurement and profiling for HPC systems (e.g., Green500). In addition to HPC, the Big Data community has gained interest in benchmarking; reference approaches to measuring and characterizing system performance for large-scale data analysis hardware and software systems remains an area of research, development, and community discussion (e.g., on the Big Data Top 100). Industry and academe have convened an ongoing series of workshops and meetings on the topic of Big Data benchmarking (http://clds.ucsd.edu/bdbc/workshops). Given the emergence of inference-based computing, the growing role of data analysis, changes in scientific workflow du
EarthCube is a community-driven activity sponsored through a partnership between the NSF Directorate for Geosciences (GEO)and the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering's (CISE) Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)to transformresearch inthe academic geosciences community. EarthCube aims to create a well-connected and facile environment to share data and knowledge in an open, transparent, and inclusive manner, thus accelerating our ability to understand and predict the Earth system. Achieving EarthCube will requirea long-term dialog between NSF and the interested scientific communities to develop cyberinfrastructure that is thoughtfully and systematically built to meet the current and future requirements of geoscientists. New avenues will be supported to gather community requirements and priorities for the elements of EarthCube, and to capture the best technologies to meet these current and future needs. The EarthCube portfolio will consist of interconnected projects and activities that engage the geosciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer science, and associated communities. The portfolio of activities and funding opportunities will evolve over time depending on the status of the EarthCube effort and the scientific and cultural needs of the geosciences community. This umbrella solicitation for EarthCube allows funding opportunities to be flexible and responsive to emerging needs and collaborative processes. The EarthCube vision and goals do not change over time, and this section of the solicitation will remain constant. Funding opportunities to develop elements of the EarthCube environment will be described in Amendments to this solicitation. Amendments will appear in the Program Description section of the solicitation and will include details on the parameters, scope, conditions, and requirements of the proposal call. Researchers who receive alerts related to solicitation releases will receive notification when the EarthCube solicitati
The goal of the Sensing, Learning, Autonomy, and Knowledge Engineering (SLAKE) program is to advance Air Force sensing capabilities by employing diverse sensor processing results at a representational or product level that is abstracted from the direct sensing output yet retains crucial information and corresponding uncertainties. Key research areas under SLAKE include development of sensor product representations suitable for efficient storage, efficient communication, and efficient resource allocation; robust conversion of sensor processing output to novel representation formats; accurate characterization of sensing uncertainties; rigorous incorporation of sensing uncertainties within novel algorithms for sensor resource management, task allocation, and information fusion; development and employment of virtual environments suitable for exercising specific algorithms and for analyzing specific system concepts; and sustained, efficient descriptions of mission context and mission operating environment. In support of technology maturation and transition, SLAKE also includes small unmanned aerial system (SUAS) integration and operation, advanced demonstration and validation.
The technology demonstrations that result from this BAA will substantially improve the Air Force's capability to conduct missions in a variety of environments while minimizing the risks to Airmen. The overall impact of integration of autonomous systems into the mission space will enable the Air Force to operate inside of the enemy's decision loop. STAT will develop and apply autonomy technologies to enhance the full mission cycle, including mission planning, mission execution, and post-mission analysis. Particular areas of interest include multi-domain command and control, manned-unmanned teaming, and information analytics. The technology demonstrations that result from this BAA will substantially improve the Air Force's capability to conduct missions in a variety of environments while minimizing the risks to Airmen. The overall impact of integration of autonomous systems into the mission space will enable the Air Force to operate inside of the enemy's decision loop. This effort plans to demonstrate modular, transferable, open system architectures, and deliver autonomy technologies applicable to a spectrum of multi-domain applications.
The Cross Domain Innovation & Science (CDIS) group of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate is interested in new innovative technologies and capabilities within the Multi-Level Security (MLS) and cyber security environments, that promote the state of the art for secure, accreditable resilient and reactive capabilities to enhance the sharing of information between multiple security domains within both enterprise and mobile/tactical environments.
The NSF's vision for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (ACI), which is part of its Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21), focuses specifically on ensuring that the science and engineering community has ready access to the advanced computational and data-driven capabilities required to tackle the most complex problems and issues facing today's scientific and educational communities. To accomplish these goals requires advanced computational capabilities within the context of a multilevel comprehensive and innovative infrastructure that benefits all fields of science and engineering. Previous solicitations have concentrated on enabling petascale capability through the deployment and support of a world-class High Performance Computing (HPC) environment. In the past decade the NSF has provided the open science and engineering community with a number of state-of-the art HPC assets ranging from loosely coupled clusters, to large scale instruments with many thousands of computing cores communicating via fast interconnects, and more recently with diverse heterogeneous architectures. Recent developments in computational science have begun to focus on complex, dynamic and diverse workflows. Some of these involve applications that are extremely data intensive and may not be dominated by floating point operation speed. While a number of the earlier acquisitions have addressed a subset of these issues, the current solicitation emphasizes this even further.
VirtUE seeks to leverage the federal government's impending migration to commercial cloud based information Technology (IT) infrastructures and the current explosion of new virtualization and operating system (OS) concepts to create and demonstrate a more secure interactive user computing environment (UCE) than the government has had in the past or likely to have in the near future. Currently the government UCE is represented by a general purpose Windows desktop OS running multiple installed applications hosted on either a dedicated physical computer or on a shared virtualized platform. When a desktop OS is hosted on a shared virtualized platform, it is called a virtualized desktop interface or VDI.
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is interested in receiving proposals for developing innovative science and technology to enhance training systems for the United States Marine Corps (USMC). The program's goal is to create a robust and efficient enterprise capability that allows the integration and interoperability of legacy, current, and future Marine Corps training information technology assets to enhance warfighter capability. Future Integrated Training Environment (FITE) has been approved as a new five year research opportunity under the Capable Manpower Pillar (CMP) Future Naval Capabilities (FNC) program. FITE is specifically focused on developing science and technology prototype capabilities to support the integration of Air and Ground Live, Virtual, and Constructive (LVC) training simulation capabilities.
NASA and the Sloan Foundation have agreed through a Space Act Agreement to work in parallel for a common purpose: to sponsor studies designed to provide insight into the microbiome of the built environment of the ISS that will advance our knowledge and understanding of human-built habitats on Earth, to enhance ISS utilization, and to inform the development of future space exploration vehicles that are occupied by humans. NASA is soliciting, through this Appendix, research applications for Postdoctoral Fellowships from early career scientists to design experiments that utilize a NASA collection of ISS microbial isolates collected over a decade or more to help understand better how microbial communities colonize, adapt, and evolve on the ISS. All proposals must propose experiments that utilize these microbial isolates collected from the ISS that have been archived at the Johnson Space Center.
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