ITR COV AC Briefing

Michael Willig

Division Director, BIO-DEB

ITR Priority Area

1) extends the frontiers of information technology,

2) improves understanding of its impacts on society,

3) helps prepare Americans for the Information Age,

4) reduces the vulnerabilities of society to catastrophic events, whether natural or man-made.

Innovative, high-risk and high-return multidisciplinary research

ITR Priority Area

5) augments the nation's information technology knowledge base,

6) strengthens the information technology workforce, and

7) fosters visionary work that could lead to major advances, new and unanticipated technologies, revolutionary applications or new ways to perform important activities.

ITR COV Overview

Held March 8-10, 2005 Fiscal Years covered: 2001, 2002, 2003 3 size classes in the ITR competition each year:

Small = Up to $500K total for 3 years Medium = Up to $1M per year for 5 years Large = Up to $3M per year for 5 years

Solicitation and management plan were aligned to each year’s scientific opportunities and external demands

ITR COV Structure: 35 Members 1 Chair, 2 Co-Chairs, 3 Team Leaders (one for each year) 3 Teams (one for each year) of 10 or 11 members each

Demographics of COV

Gender: 13 females; 22 males. Geographic Distribution: Northeast: 3; Mid-Atlantic: 6; South: 10;

Mid-west: 6, West: 10. Minority Representation: 4 African Americans; 2 Hispanic

Americans; 2 African American-Hispanic Americans; 1 Asian American; (1 American Indian was invited and accepted the invitation, and then became ill the day before the COV).

Academic Institutions: Public: 24; Private: 8 Federal Labs: 1 Businesses: 2 large ITR awardees: 12 ITR awardees No submission to ITR in past 5 years: 14 Not currently sitting on an NSF AC: 26

BIO CISE ENG GEO MPSSBE/OISE OPP

R&RASubtotal EHR MREFC

Total,NSF

FY 2000 90.00 $90.00 36.00 $126.00FY 2001 5.19 155.48 8.17 10.90 29.62 3.82 1.09 $214.27 2.00 44.90 $261.17FY 2002 6.08 173.51 10.23 12.16 32.66 4.36 1.22 $240.22 2.00 35.00 $277.22FY 2003 6.80 215.17 11.17 13.21 35.52 4.60 1.33 $287.80 2.48 44.83 $335.11FY 2004 7.50 218.07 10.31 14.56 38.57 5.15 1.55 $295.71 3.05 10.05 $308.80

Source: NSF Budget Thematics

ITR Funding by Directorate

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

Large Medium Small Total

Proposal Size

FY01-FY03 ITR Success Rate

FY01

FY02

FY03

Funding Rate, NSF Research Grants

ITRCOV Agenda

Learning about the ITR program from ITR Program Directors

Learning about the science and education by talking with Program Directors in poster sessions***

Reading ITR awards and declines – small, medium and large

Working in teams to complete the report Talking with the ADs about recommendations Working across teams to synthesize and prepare

executive summary

ITR COV RecommendationsPart A: ITR Processes & Mgmt

Recognize the problem of assembling a strong, diverse, COI-free pool of reviewers when almost the entire community is submitting ITR proposals Additional quality mail reviews would help

How to ensure that proposers, reviewers, panels, and NSF PDs address both merit review criteria Different interpretations of what is meant by broader impacts Should emphasize importance of broadening participation

How to measure (as part of the review process) Which are high risk, high payoff proposals ? Which are truly multidisciplinary proposals ?

Evaluation and continuing oversight of large and medium projects

ITR COV RecommendationsPart B: ITR Outputs & Outcomes

Concerns about diversity in students, leadership, and participants

Many “best of breed” ideas enabled by ITR New interdisciplinary NSF areas seeded and fueled by ITR

Bioinformatics, geoinformatics, scientific computing, e-business Encouraged community building (and reaching across

institutional boundaries) by researchers and by NSF PD’s Many tools developed, best practices beginning to evolve

How are their impacts evaluated and will they be maintained after ITR ?

Are they now – and will they be in the future – broadly accessible ?

Critical to capture lessons learned and incorporate proven business practices to prevent future problems

ITR COV RecommendationsITR PART Specific Questions

Made significant research contributions to software-design and quality,scalable information infrastructure, high-end computing, IT workforce, and socio-economic impacts of IT Outstanding nuggets for entire laundry list

Ensured meaningful and effective collaboration across disciplines of science and engineering Solicitations encouraged interdisciplinary research in all years Over the years and size classes ~33% of proposals were co-funded across

the Foundation Management plans (always encouraged, required in large proposals) forced

PIs to think about & develop plans for collaboration … and reviewers and panels to evaluate these plans

ITR COV RecommendationsC: Other Topics

Future large initiatives like ITR should have appropriate, assigned NSF staffing levels Capture and transfer what PD’s learned about

running large, complex, interdisciplinary Priority Area initiatives

Compromises between success rates and funding levels/cuts

Capture and transfer what PIs learned about managing and coordinating large, interdisciplinary, multi-institutional projects

ITR COV RecommendationsC: Other Topics

How can projects be sustained after ITR for their productive research lifetime?

Maintenance and evolution of ITR products, infrastructures, & virtual organizations necessary to the broader research community (digital repositories, etc.)

ITR has played a key role in launching interdisciplinary projects within NSF …

ITR COV BIO “Nugget Posters”

Heath: Understanding Stress Resistance Murphy: Bio-Molecular Imaging Dickerson: High Dimensional Metabolic

Networks Moret: Building the Tee of Life Michener: Science Environment for

Ecological Knowledge St. John: Exploring the Tree of Life