Please see the new NSF/CISE FY11 cross-cutting program, Smart Health and Wellbeing, which we announced on Friday, June 11: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10575/nsf10575.htm. We are looking for your great ideas for how advances in computer and information science and engineering can transform the nature and conduct of healthcare and wellness as we know it today. (Contributed by Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director for NSF/CISE)

On May 4 I posted a short message titled “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  That was an effort to focus attention on an issue.  This post provides a suggestion for computing researchers when dealing with work that seems unfamiliar or difficult to understand. Computing is a “general purpose” phenomenon.  It can be applied to many things, which brings heterogeneous communities to the discussion.  The computing research field has porous boundaries, making it an intellectual watering hole.  This offers stimulation and excitement, but it can cause problems.  People from different fields follow different conventions for doing or explaining their work.  Philipe van Parijs has addressed this as Clarity and […]

“There is a variety of mechanisms through which the research community can participate in agenda-setting. One model I have found to be very valuable is exemplified by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) … “CCC has played an important role in identifying and promoting exciting “visions” for the future of Information Technology (IT) research — ideas that have the potential to attract the best and brightest to the field, drive economic growth, and address national challenges in areas such as health, energy, and education … “These papers and workshop reports have had a clear influence on Administration budget and recruiting decisions and have already sparked collaborations between government, industry, and academia. […]

Attached is a new DoD directive, reinforcing and clarifying the role of fundamental research at universities.  Roughly speaking, the new DARPA policies governing fundamental research at universities are now being adopted across all of DoD.  This means no pre-publication reviews, no export controls, and no issues with foreign researchers, except in “rare and exceptional circumstances.” It’s remarkably how rapidly things are returning to a sane state!

Three quick notes … First, I can’t believe that there weren’t more comments on John King’s terrific post,  “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  This is serious business.  And it’s not “new news” — CISE has had the lowest average proposal scores in NSF for years.  We are killing ourselves in a misguided effort to show how smart we are.  (The number of “highly ranked proposals” that can’t be funded is, quite naturally, a criterion argued within NSF for the allocation of funds among Directorates.)  For god’s sake! Second, the NSF Graduate Fellowship awardees have recently been announced.  Did you know that the number of fellowships awarded to each […]

A friend of mine from Field X once served as a program officer at a major research funding agency. (Names changed to protect the innocent.) As part of a quality assurance scheme, he was asked to review the proposal process for Field Y. He was surprised that every proposal he looked at, whether funded or not, was rated very high. He asked the program officer for Field Y how proposals could be ranked if they were all rated so high. He was told to pay no attention to the rating, but to look at what the reviewer said. So my friend looked at a number of highly-rated proposals. He found […]