Group items tagged

Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity. Proposals will be evaluated on the strength of the science enabled (including research and education) as drivers for investment and innovation in data networking infrastructure, innovation and engineering. A common theme across all aspects of the CC* program is the critical importance of the partnership among campus-level CI experts, including the campus Information Technology (IT)/networking/data organization, contributing domain scientists, research groups, and educators necessary to engage in, and drive, new networking capabilities and approaches in support of scientific discovery. Proposals across the program should reflect and demonstrate this partnership on campus. Proposals will be evaluated on the strength of institutional partnerships, as they are expected to play a central role in developing and implementing the eventual network and data infrastructure upgrades.

The Nation's advanced research cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem catalyzes discovery and innovation across all areas of science and engineering (S&E) research and education. The increasingly complex and rapidly evolving S&E landscape requires an agile, integrated, robust, trustworthy, and sustainable CI ecosystem that will drive new thinking and transformative discoveries in all areas of research and education. The success of this vision depends on the ability of the research community to be able to easily and effectively access and use state-of-the-art research CI resources and services in a timely way. This, in turn, drives a set of requirements on the development, operation, and evolution of the CI ecosystem. First, research CI resources and services must be designed to leverage and drive innovations, and they must be user-centric and interoperable to enable the efficient, flexible end-to-end discovery pathways that are increasingly essential for the conduct of research. Second, the information, expertise, and services needed to maximally utilize the CI ecosystem must be disseminated broadly and concertedly to the research community. The NSF Cyberinfrastructure Centers of Excellence (CI CoE) Program aims to realize the above vision by supporting hubs of expertise and innovation targeting specific areas, aspects, or stakeholder communities of the research CI ecosystem.

Through its Fellowship Programs, the Ford Foundation seeks to increase the diversity of the nation's college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.

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.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. NSF encourages submission of CAREER proposals from early-career faculty at all CAREER-eligible organizations and especially encourages women, members of underrepresented minority groups, and persons with disabilities to apply.

In 2016, the National Science Foundation (NSF) unveiled a set of "Big Ideas," 10 bold, long-term research and enabling ideas that identify areas for future investment at the frontiers of science and engineering (see https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/big_ideas/index.jsp). The Big Ideas represent unique opportunities to position our Nation at the cutting edge of global science and engineering leadership by bringing together diverse disciplinary perspectives to support convergence research. As such, although when responding to this solicitation proposals must be submitted to the Division of Emerging Frontiers in the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO/EF), upon receipt proposals will be managed by a cross-Directorate team of NSF Program Directors. A full list of the Understanding the Rules of Life awards can be found on the NSF Awards Search.

The Department of Defense (DoD) seeks innovative applications on mechanisms to implement Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education, outreach, and/or workforce initiative programs, here onto will be referred as STEM activities. The Department intends to award multiple grants, subject to the availability of funds. Each individual award will be up to a maximum of $3,000,000, for a period of up to three (3) years. Applications for larger amounts may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

This program will increase technological investigative capacity and associated training for law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies. This solicitation will particularly focus on supporting the development, refinement, and advancement of widely used investigative tools, methods and technologies that address child pornography, exploitation and sex trafficking.