OARS funding Systems

The need to process large data sets arising in many practical problems require real-time learning from data streams makes high-performance hardware necessary, and yet the very nature of these problems, along with currently known algorithms for addressing them, imposes significant hardware challenges. Current versions of deep-learning algorithms operate by using millions of parameters whose optimal values need to be determined for good performance in real time on high-performance hardware. Conversely, the availability of fast hardware implementations can enable fuller use of Bayesian techniques, attractive for their ability to quantify prediction uncertainty and thus give estimates of reliability and prediction breakdown. The abilities of ML systems to self-assess for reliability and predict their own breakdowns (and also recover without significant ill effects) constitute critical areas for algorithm development as autonomous systems become widely deployed in both decision support and embodied AI agents. Only with attention to these challenges can we construct systems that are robust when they encounter novel situations or degradation and failure of sensors.

Submit an application if you are a successful top-rank junior researcher from abroad, only completed your doctorate with distinction in the last six years, and have published work in prestigious international journals or publishing houses. The Sofja Kovalevskaja Award allows you to spend five years building up a working group and working on a high-profile, innovative research project of your own choice at a research institution of your own choice in Germany.

The ACI is a DoD-sponsored computing systems research program initiated by the NSA and the Combat Capabilities Development Command/Army Research Laboratory/ARO. It focuses on areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy. It seeks to increase the Department's intellectual capital in computing systems and improve its ability to address future challenges and build bridges between the Department and the computing research community. ACI brings together universities, research institutions, companies, and individual scholars and supports multidisciplinary and cross-institutional projects addressing specific topic areas determined by the Department of Defense. The ACI aims to promote research in specific areas of computing systems and to promote a candid and constructive relationship between DoD and the computing research community.

NSF's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea is a national-scale activity to enable new modes of data-driven discovery that will allow fundamental questions to be asked and answered at the frontiers of science and engineering. Through this NSF-wide activity, HDR will generate new knowledge and understanding, and accelerate discovery and innovation. The HDR vision is realized through an interrelated set of efforts in: Foundations of data science; Algorithms and systems for data science; Data-intensive science and engineering; Data cyberinfrastructure; and Education and workforce development. Each of these efforts is designed to amplify the intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of the emerging field of data science. The HDR Big Idea will establish theoretical, technical, and ethical frameworks that will be applied to tackle data-intensive problems in science and engineering, contributing to data-driven decision-making that impacts society.

Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes are large-scale interdisciplinary research projects that aim to advance the frontiers of quantum information science and engineering. Research at these Institutes will span the focus areas of quantum computation, quantum communication, quantum simulation and/or quantum sensing. The institutes are expected to foster multidisciplinary approaches to specific scientific, technological, educational workforce development goals in these fields. Two types of awards will be supported under this program: (i) 12-month Conceptualization Grants (CGs) to support teams envisioning subsequent Institute proposals and (ii) 5-year Challenge Institute (CI) awards to establish and operate Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes. This activity is part of the Quantum Leap, one of the research Big Ideas promoted by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes program is consistent with the scope of NSF multidisciplinary centers for quantum research and education as described in the National Quantum Initiative Act[1]. In 2016, the NSF unveiled a set of "Big Ideas," ten bold, long-term research and process ideas that identify areas for future investment at the frontiers of science and engineering (seehttps://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. Although proposals responding to this solicitation must be submitted tothe Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS),they will subsequently be managed by a cross-disciplinary team of NSF Program Directors.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and The Boeing Company are supporting a new initiative, managed and administered by NSF through its EHR Core Research (ECR) program, to accelerate training in critical skill areas for the Nation's engineering and advanced manufacturing workforce. The EHR Core Research: Production Engineering Education and Research (ECR: PEER) initiative supports foundational research arising from the design, development, and deployment of creative online curricula that provide learners at various levels with skills in five focal areas: model-based systems engineering, software engineering, mechatronics, data science, and artificial intelligence. ECR: PEER invites proposals to design, develop, deploy, and study the effectiveness of online courses in any one of these focal areas using the theories and tools of the learning sciences. Proposals for these ECR: PEER Course, Curriculum, and Evaluation projects may request a maximum of $2,000,000 support for a duration of up to three years. Additionally, ECR: PEER welcomes proposals to convene experts in the academic, for-profit, and non-profit sectors to imagine the future of production engineering education for one of the five focal areas. Proposals for these ECR: PEER Workforce Development Workshops may request a maximum of $100,000 support for a duration of up to one year.

The purpose of this Request for Proposal (RFP) is to solicit proposals from firms experienced in the development and implementation of Robotics Process Automation (RPA) solutions. BWC is interested in evaluating solutions which would enable the agency to automate structured repetitive tasks to minimize manual intervention and introduce process efficiencies. Such processes will typically require the bots to access multiple systems, various formats of data like text, excel workbooks, word, databases and subsequently retrieve, populate and generate data fields based on responses. The proposed solution must have the capability to automate end to end processes and contain inherent logic handling mechanisms with exception handling.

The Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) umbrella program seeks to enable funding opportunities that are flexible and responsive to the evolving and emerging needs in cyberinfrastructure. This program continues the CSSI program by removing the distinction between software and data elements/framework implementations, and instead emphasizing integrated cyberinfrastructure services, quantitative metrics with targets for delivery and usage of these services, and community creation.

NSF's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea is a national-scale activity to enable new modes of data-driven discovery that will allow fundamental questions to be asked and answered at the frontiers of science and engineering. Through this NSF-wide activity, HDR will generate new knowledge and understanding, and accelerate discovery and innovation. The HDR vision is realized through an interrelated set of efforts in: Foundations of data science; Algorithms and systems for data science; Data-intensive science and engineering; Data cyberinfrastructure; and Education and workforce development. Each of these efforts is designed to amplify the intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of the emerging field of data science. The HDR Big Idea will establish theoretical, technical, and ethical frameworks that will be applied to tackle data-intensive problems in science and engineering, contributing to data-driven decision-making that impacts society.

Increasingly, undergraduate computer science (CS) programs are being called upon to prepare larger and more diverse student populations for careers in both CS and non-CS fields, including careers in scientific and non-scientific disciplines. Many of these students aim to acquire the understandings and competencies needed to learn how to  use computation collaboratively across different contexts and challenging problems. However, standard CS course sequences do not always serve these students well. With this solicitation, NSF will support teams of Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs) in re-envisioning the role of computing in interdisciplinary collaboration within their institutions. In addition, NSF will encourage partnering IHEs to use this opportunity to integrate the study of ethics into their curricula, both within core CS courses and across the relevant interdisciplinary application areas.

The intent of this solicitation is to request proposals from organizations willing to serve as service providers (SPs) within the NSF Innovative High-Performance Computing (HPC) program to provide advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) capabilities and/or services in production operations to support the full range of computational- and data-intensive research across all of science and engineering (S&E). The current solicitation is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure by provisioning resources, broadly defined in this solicitation to include systems and/or services, in two categories: The first is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure.  Consistent with the ACI Strategic Plan, the current solicitation is focused on expanding the use of high end resources to a much larger and more diverse community.   The second type is devoted to the increasing pressure on the existing infrastructure to store and process very large amounts of data coming from simulation and from experimental resources such as telescopes, genome data banks or sensors.

The Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program invests in coordinated campus-level networking and cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. Learning and workforce development (LWD) in cyberinfrastructure is explicitly addressed in the program. Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity.

he intent of this solicitation is to request proposals from organizations willing to serve as service providers (SPs) within the NSF Innovative High-Performance Computing (HPC) program to provide advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) capabilities and/or services in production operations to support the full range of computational- and data-intensive research across all of science and engineering (S&E). The current solicitation is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure by provisioning resources, broadly defined in this solicitation to include systems and/or services, in two categories: Category I, Capacity Systems: production computational resources maximizing the capacity provided to support the broad range of computation and data analytics needs in S&E research; and Category II, Innovative Prototypes/Testbeds: innovative forward-looking capabilities deploying novel technologies, architectures, usage modes, etc., and exploring new target applications, methods, and paradigms for S&E discoveries.

The Defense Sciences Office (DSO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of: automated and sensor fused data analytics, network infrastructure and system integration, and interfaces and interoperability to support a networked system for the detection, interdiction, and deterrence of clandestine weapons of mass destruction (WMD) activities. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, and systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.

The Miami Initiative for Advancing, Mentoring and Investing in Women (M.I.A.M.I. WOMEN) awarded nearly $104,000 in Giving Circle grants to students and faculty during the annual Leadership Symposium on April 12, 2018. Finalists pitched their projects the previous evening at the inaugural Hawk Tank event. This grant fund is open again for the 2018-2019 cycle.

This program seeks to prepare, nurture, and grow the national scientific research workforce for creating, utilizing, and supporting advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) to enable and potentially transform fundamental science and engineering research and contribute to the Nation's overall economic competitiveness and security. The goals of this solicitation are to (i) ensure broad adoption of CI tools, methods, and resources by the research community in order to catalyze major research advances and to enhance researchers' abilities to lead the development of new CI; and (ii) integrate core literacy and discipline-appropriate advanced skills in advanced CI as well as computational and data-driven science and engineering into the Nation's educational curriculum/instructional material fabric spanning undergraduate and graduate courses for advancing fundamental research. Pilot and Implementation projects may target one or both of the solicitation goals, while Large-scale Project Conceptualization projects must address both goals. For the purpose of this solicitation, advanced CI is broadly defined as the set of resources, tools, methods, and services for advanced computation, large-scale data handling and analytics, and networking and security for large-scale systems that collectively enable potentially transformative fundamental research.

Cyberspace has transformed the daily lives of people. Society's overwhelming reliance on cyberspace, however, has exposed its fragility and vulnerabilities: corporations, agencies, national infrastructure and individuals continue to suffer cyber-attacks. Achieving a truly secure cyberspace requires addressing both challenging scientific and engineering problems involving many components of a system, and vulnerabilities that stem from human behaviors and choices. Examining the fundamentals of security and privacy as a multidisciplinary subject can lead to fundamentally new ways to design, build and operate cyber systems, protect existing infrastructure, and motivate and educate individuals about cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014, as amended by the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2018, authorizes the National Science Foundation, in coordination with the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Homeland Security, to offer a scholarship program to recruit and train the next generation of information technology professionals, industry control system security professionals and security managers to meet the needs of the cybersecurity mission for federal, state, local, and tribal governments.

Computing systems have undergone a fundamental transformation from the single-core processor-devices of the turn of the century to today's ubiquitous and networked devices with multi-core/many-core processors along with warehouse-scale computing via the cloud. At the same time, semiconductor technology is facing fundamental physical limits and single-processor performance has plateaued. This means that the ability to achieve performance improvements through improved processor technologies alone has ended. In recognition of this obstacle, the recent National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) encourages collaborative efforts to develop, "over the next 15 years, a viable path forward for future high-performance computing (HPC) systems even after the limits of current semiconductor technology are reached (the 'post-Moore's Law era')."

Increasingly, data- and compute-intensive research and education efforts are benefiting from access to cloud computing platforms, which provide robust, agile, reliable, and scalable infrastructure. To better support this growing use of cloud computing resources, the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) seeks to fund an entity that can serve as a principal interface between the CISE research and education community and public cloud computing providers. Through this solicitation, NSF will support an entity that will have multiple responsibilities, including: 1) establishing partnerships with the various public cloud computing providers; 2) assisting NSF in allocating cloud computing resources to qualifying CISE-funded projects; 3) managing cloud computing accounts and resources allocated to individual CISE projects; 4) providing user training and other support to CISE researchers and educators using cloud computing in their work; and 5) providing strategic technical guidance for CISE researchers and educators interested in using public cloud computing platforms.

This announcement seeks revolutionary research ideas for topics not being addressed by ongoing MTO programs or other published solicitations.