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The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

USDA/NIFA Request for Applications on Food and Agriculture Cyber-infrastructure and Tools

June 5th, 2018 / in Announcements, CCC, research horizons, Research News / by Helen Wright

Former CCC Council member and current CRA Board member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota provided contributions to this post.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative’s Food and Agriculture Cyberinformatics and Tools (FACT) initiative has issued a call for proposals that 1) focus on fundamental or core big data analytics and tool development, and/or 2) apply big data concepts to specific science domains or across domains and sectors for any of the Plant health and production and plant products program area priorities.

A snippet from the USDA/NIFA Request for Applications (RFA):

This program area priority focuses on data science to enable systems and communities to effectively utilize data, improve resource management, and integrate new technologies and approaches to further U.S. food and agriculture enterprises. The program encourages university-based research as well as public and private partnerships.

The program will support projects that examine the value of data for small and large farmers, agricultural and food industries, and gain an understanding of how data can impact the agricultural supply chain, reduce food waste and loss, improve consumer health, environmental and natural resource management, affect the structure of U.S. food and agriculture sectors, and increase U.S. competitiveness.

Applications for research or integrated projects must address one of the following priorities:

Design and Implementation

Build scalable data infrastructure and management systems

Conceptualize Open Data FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable for all experimental and research data

Develop standards and best practices with other government and international organizations

Analysis

Develop data-integration and data-quality tools to improve analytic capability

Design and implement new algorithms and methods for depicting massive data

Technologies

Connect multiscale data

Bridge real-time distributed and parallel data systems

Create new methodologies and frameworks for tracking and processing data

Identify new approaches to data archiving and sharing 52

Applications and Human-Technology-Data Interactions

Examine scientific implications and practical aspects of how agricultural data and computer systems are accessed, designed, and used to improve human-human, human-technology, and human-decision experiences

Integrate visualization with statistical methods and other analytic techniques in order to support discovery and analysis

Engage students and professionals, teams, universities and public/private sectors

Develop decision-support tools that use diverse data sources and Big Data analytics modeling short-term impacts of various factors to create best value to the U S agricultural enterprise

Applications for Coordinated Innovation Networks should:

Foster a cohesive, multi-disciplinary community that addresses bottlenecks in critical areas (e.g., high-throughput phenomics; systems modeling, access and integration of data from technologies like sensors and drones; smart cities);

Identify innovative and synergistic activities that prioritize needs and develop data standards for efforts in critical areas;

Bring together researchers (for research projects) or research, education, and/or extension (for integrated projects) communities working on multiple aspects of a data-supported problem into one multi-disciplinary network to collectively advance the field;

Include robust representation of public and commercial entities from relevant disciplines (e.g., geneticists, physiologists, engineers, informaticians, modelers, economists, social scientists, extension professionals and stakeholders);

Promote collaboration among research and education communities, both domestic and international, to leverage and facilitate sharing of expertise and resources; and

Develop and maintain effective networking strategies for connecting the public and private sector, students, and the media to foster interest and societal engagement.

The amount available for new grants in this FY 2018 Foundational and Applied Science Program RFA is approximately $182 million.

Applicants should submit a letter of intent (LOI) to the FACT Program Area Priority (A1541) by the LOI deadline (July 25, 2018), described in this RFA. The LOI is a prerequisite to submit an application for the FACT initiative, which is due on October 31, 2018.

For additional resources on FACT including frequently asked questions, see the FACT page.

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