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The U.S. Department of Transportation today announced the opportunity for state and local stakeholders to apply for $500 million in discretionary grant funding through the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program. "The TIGER grant program is a highly competitive program whose winners will be awarded with the funding they need to rebuild the infrastructure of their communities," said Secretary Elaine L. Chao. "TIGER grants will continue to fund innovative projects that will improve the safety of America's passengers and goods." The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017 appropriated $500 million, available through September 30, 2020, for National Infrastructure Investments otherwise known as TIGER grants. As with previous rounds of TIGER, funds for the fiscal year (FY) 2017 TIGER grants program are to be awarded on a competitive basis for projects that will have a significant impact on the Nation, a metropolitan area, or a region. The FY 2017 Appropriations Act specifies that TIGER Discretionary Grants may not be less than $5 million and not greater than $25 million, except that for projects located in rural areas the minimum TIGER Discretionary Grant size is $1 million. The selection criteria remain fundamentally the same as previous rounds of the TIGER grants program, but the description of each criterion was updated. Additionally, the FY 2017 TIGER program will give special consideration to projects which emphasize improved access to reliable, safe, and affordable transportation for communities in rural areas, such as projects that improve infrastructure condition, address public health and safety, promote regional connectivity, or facilitate economic growth or competitiveness.

While there have been a few independent studies of the noise associated with various rumble strip designs, they are difficult to compare because they use different vehicle types, acoustical equipment and procedures, and rumble strip designs. Due to the scope of the issue, expertise from both transportation safety and noise professionals are required to study the issue. Providing state, local, and federal agencies with recommended rumble strip designs that offer adequate alerting driver feedback and reduced external noise would potentially increase their use and expand opportunities for agencies to reach safety performance goals. The objectives of this research are to: (1) identify or design and evaluate alternative rumble strips that provide effective alerting noise and vibration within vehicles and minimize perceived external noise, while considering several variables (e.g., vehicle types, pavement types, and speed); (2) recommend low-noise rumble strip designs that accommodate all users; and (3) develop recommendations for standard testing and measurement protocols

Nanomanufacturing is the production of useful nano-scale materials, structures, devices and systems in an economically viable manner. The NSF Nanomanufacturing Program supports fundamental research in novel methods and techniques for batch and continuous processes, top-down (addition/subtraction) and bottom-up (directed self-assembly) processes leading to the formation of complex heterogeneous nanosystems. The program supports basic research in nanostructure and process design principles, integration across length-scales, and system-level integration. The Program leverages advances in the understanding of nano-scale phenomena and processes (physical, chemical, electrical, thermal, mechanical and biological), nanomaterials discovery, novel nanostructure architectures, and new nanodevice and nanosystem concepts. It seeks to address quality, efficiency, scalability, reliability, safety and affordability issues that are relevant to manufacturing. To address these issues, the Program encourages research on processes and production systems based on computation, modeling and simulation, use of process metrology, sensing, monitoring, and control, and assessment of product (nanomaterial, nanostructure, nanodevice or nanosystem) quality and performance.

Nanomanufacturing is the production of useful nano-scale materials, structures, devices and systems in an economically viable manner. The NSF Nanomanufacturing Program supports fundamental research in novel methods and techniques for batch and continuous processes, top-down (addition/subtraction) and bottom-up (directed self-assembly) processes leading to the formation of complex heterogeneous nanosystems. The program supports basic research in nanostructure and process design principles, integration across length-scales, and system-level integration. The Program leverages advances in the understanding of nano-scale phenomena and processes (physical, chemical, electrical, thermal, mechanical and biological), nanomaterials discovery, novel nanostructure architectures, and new nanodevice and nanosystem concepts. It seeks to address quality, efficiency, scalability, reliability, safety and affordability issues that are relevant to manufacturing. To address these issues, the Program encourages research on processes and production systems based on computation, modeling and simulation, use of process metrology, sensing, monitoring, and control, and assessment of product (nanomaterial, nanostructure, nanodevice or nanosystem) quality and performance.

The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to encourage small businesses to address the technological needs of the Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP). The KPMP will obtain and evaluate kidney biopsies from participants with acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD), create a kidney tissue atlas, define disease subgroups, and identify critical cells, pathways and targets for novel therapies. Proposed technologies are expected to improve the safety of the human kidney biopsy or enhance interrogation of human kidney tissue, thus ensuring that the kidney biopsy yields useful research or clinical information.

The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is to encourage small businesses to address the technological needs of the Kidney Precision Medicine Project (KPMP). The KPMP will obtain and evaluate kidney biopsies from participants with acute kidney injury (AKI) and chronic kidney disease (CKD), create a kidney tissue atlas, define disease subgroups, and identify critical cells, pathways and targets for novel therapies. Proposed technologies are expected to improve the safety of the human kidney biopsy or enhance interrogation of human kidney tissue, thus ensuring that the kidney biopsy yields useful research or clinical information.

NSF has long supported transformative research in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The resulting innovations offer new levels of economic opportunity and growth, safety and security, and health and wellness. At the same time, broad acceptance of large-scale deployments of AI systems relies critically on their trustworthiness which, in turn, depends upon the collective ability to ensure, assess, and ultimately demonstrate the fairness, transparency, explainability, and accountability of such systems. Importantly, the beneficial effects of AI systems should be broadly available across all segments of society. NSF and Amazon are partnering to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society. Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to transparency, explainability, accountability, potential adverse biases and effects, mitigation strategies, validation of fairness, and considerations of inclusivity. Funded projects will enable broadened acceptance of AI systems, helping the U.S. further capitalize on the potential of AI technologies. Although Amazon provides partial funding for this program, it will not play a role in the selection of proposals for award.

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.

FRA's Office of Research, Development and Technology is charged with conducting research and development in support of improved railroad safety and national rail transportation policy. These activities support the objectives of the DOT, the mission critical needs of FRA, and the rail industry through technology development and demonstration, basic and applied research, and information exchange within the rail industry.

The NIST Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program - User Interface seeks applications from eligible applicants for activities to accelerate research, development, production, and testing of user interface technologies and capabilities through the use of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) for first responders as described in Section I. of this NOFO/Full Announcement.

The objective of the Marine and Hydrokinetic System Performance Advancement FOA is to advance technology performance of existing marine and hydrokinetic systems through the development and application of innovative components that are designed and built specifically for MHK applications.  This FOA will focus on improving the cost competitiveness of systems already in development, with the goal of advancing the technology performance of these systems.   This FOA will support component development projects in three topic areas that have the greatest potential to impact power to weight ratio and availability:   Topic Area 1:  Advanced Controls - to improve energy capture, availability, and safety. Topic Area 2:  Next-Gen Power Take-Off (PTO) - to increase energy efficiency, reduce weight, and improve reliability.   Topic Area 3:  Optimized Structures - to improve energy capture, reduce weight, and improve reliability.

The Combustion, Fire, and Plasma Systems program supports fundamental research and education relevant to these subjects.  Among the broader societal impacts of the program are cleaner global and local environments, enhanced public safety, improved energy and homeland security, useful new materials, and more efficient manufacturing. This program is not an applied program, but rather it endeavors to provide basic knowledge that is needed to develop useful combustion and plasma applications and for mitigating the effects of fire.  Broad-based tools - experimental, diagnostic, and computational - that can be applied to a variety of problems in combustion, fires, and plasma systems are the major products of this program. 

The Graduate Research Fellowship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (GRF-STEM) provides awards to accredited academic institutions to support graduate research leading to doctoral degrees in topic areas that are relevant to ensuring public safety, preventing and controlling crime, and ensuring the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice in the United States. Applicant academic institutions sponsoring doctoral students are eligible to apply only if the doctoral student's degree program is a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) discipline; and the student's proposed dissertation research has demonstrable implications for addressing the challenges of crime and/or the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice in the United States.Awards are anticipated to be made to successful applicant institutions in the form of grants to cover fellowships for the sponsored doctoral students

BARD projects, conducted cooperatively by American and Israeli scientists, cover all phases of agricultural research and development, including integrated projects and strategic or applied research. Cooperative research entails active collaboration between Israeli and American scientists. The following research areas were identified by the Board of Directors as top priorities for the coming years: Increased Efficiency of Agricultural Production Protection of Plants and Animals Against Biotic and Abiotic Stress Food Quality, Safety and Security Water Quality & Quantity Functional Genomics and Proteomics Sensors and Robotics Sustainable Bio-Energy Systems

NSF-funded advancements are enabling a wide variety of beneficial applications of UAS in areas such as monitoring and inspection of physical infrastructure, prevention of airport bird strikes, smart emergency/disaster response, natural gas leak detection, agriculture support, personal services, and observation and study of weather phenomena including severe storms. These advances are made possible through fundamental investments in theoretical principles of UAS, including intelligent sensing, perception, and control; estimation; communications; collaboration and teaming; UAS adaptation and learning; human-UAS interaction; and safety, security, and privacy of UAS. These novel fundamental approaches enable increased understanding of how to intelligently and effectively design, control, and apply UAS to beneficial applications. NSF welcomes proposals that accelerate fundamental technological advances in UAS; these proposals should be submitted to existing CISE and ENG core and crosscutting research programs, following all proposal preparation instructions specified in the corresponding program announcements and solicitations. All proposals must meet the requirements of NSF's Grant Proposal Guide (GPG), along with any program- or solicitation-specific proposal preparation instructions and review criteria. Proposals must be synergistic with the goals of the programs to which they are submitted.

The NIJ Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program in Social and Behavioral Sciences is open to doctoral students in all social and behavioral science disciplines. This program provides awards to accredited academic institutions to support graduate research leading to doctoral degrees in areas that are relevant to ensuring public safety, preventing and controlling crime, and ensuring the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice in the United States. NIJ invests in doctoral education by supporting academic institutions that sponsor students who demonstrate the potential to successfully complete doctoral degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of NIJ and who are in the final stages of graduate study. Applicants sponsoring doctoral students are eligible to apply only (1) if the doctoral student'‚ƒƒ™s degree program is a Social and Behavioral Science discipline and (2) if the student's proposed dissertation research has direct implications for criminal justice policy and practice in the United States.

Many nanofabrication techniques have demonstrated the ability to synthesize small quantities of nanomaterials and nanostructures for characterization and evaluation and simple nanodevices for analysis and testing purposes. The emphasis of the Scalable Nanomanufacturing for Integrated Systems (SNM-IS) solicitation is on research in new nano-scale manufacturing concepts and integration methods to realize complex integrated systems based on nanotechnology. The research will focus on overcoming the key scientific and engineering barriers that prevent the translation of laboratory-scale discoveries in nano-enabled integrated systems to an industrially relevant scale, reliably, affordably and within sustainability and environmental, health and safety (EHS) guidelines. The goal of the SNM-IS solicitation is to study and formulate the fundamental principles of scalable nanomanufacturing and integration for nanotechnology-based integrated systems towards the eventual manufacture of useful nano-enabled products.

The Graduate Research Fellowship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (GRF-STEM) provides awards to accredited academic institutions to support graduate research leading to doctoral degrees in topic areas that are relevant to ensuring public safety, preventing and controlling crime, and ensuring the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice in the United States. Applicant academic institutions sponsoring doctoral students are eligible to apply only if the doctoral student's degree program is a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) discipline; and the student's proposed dissertation research has demonstrable implications for addressing the challenges of crime and/or the fair and impartial administration of criminal justice in the United States. Awards are anticipated to be made to successful applicant institutions in the form of grants to cover fellowships for the sponsored doctoral students. Although the initial award is only for 1 year of funding, each fellowship potentially provides up to 3 years of support usable over a 5-year period, pending NIJ review of continued enrollment and adequate progress. For each year of support, NIJ provides the degree-granting institution a stipend of $35,000 usable toward the student's salary and related costs, and up to $15,000 to cover the student's tuition and fees, research expenses, and related costs.

Over the past few years, Project Open Data (https://project-open-data.cio.gov/) has sought to identify and share best practices, examples, and software code to assist federal agencies with opening up access to data. Moreover, there have been efforts to scale up "open data" across various application sectors, including health, energy, climate, education and learning, finance, public safety, and global development, unlocking valuable data and improving decision making by making data resources more open and accessible to innovators and the public. NSF has established a national network of Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs and Spokes (BD Hubs and Spokes), comprising members from academia, industry, and government, with the goal of igniting new public-private partnerships across the Nation in big data research and development as well as training and education. Facilitating access to data is one of the objectives of the BD Hubs and Spokes. Collectively, these initiatives constitute an important first step in supporting the growing and interdisciplinary data science research community, which requires access to real-world datasets, e.g., as training data that can further data science, including machine learning capabilities, and enhance knowledge and decision making in various application sectors.

he purpose of this program is to investigate and evaluate advanced fuels and fuel technologies, fuel system component development, advanced combustor and augmentor designs, advanced fuel properties measurements, fuel system component development and safety and combustion emissions along with their integration into advanced aerospace applications and advanced technologies to prevent and mitigate fuel biodeterioration. Research will be performed to characterize and develop advanced fuels- and combustion-related technologies for use at all operating conditions in current and advanced weapons systems. 

The purpose of this program is to investigate and evaluate advanced fuels and fuel technologies, fuel system component development, advanced combustor and augmentor designs, advanced fuel properties measurements, fuel system component development and safety and combustion emissions along with their integration into advanced aerospace applications and advanced technologies to prevent and mitigate fuel biodeterioration.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announces a fourth year of a program on collaborative research and education in the area of scalable nanomanufacturing, including the long-term societal implications of the large-scale implementation of nanomanufacturing innovations. This program is in response to and is a component of the National Nanotechnology Initiative Signature Initiative: Sustainable Nanomanufacturing - Creating the Industries of the Future (http://www.nano.gov/node/611.) Although many nanofabrication techniques have demonstrated the ability to fabricate small quantities of nanomaterials, nanostructures and nanodevices for characterization and evaluation purposes, the emphasis of the scalable nanomanufacturing program is on research to overcome the key scientific and technological barriers that prevent the production of useful nanomaterials, nanostructures, devices and systems at an industrially relevant scale, reliably, and at low cost and within environmental, health and safety guidelines.