ITR COV AC Briefing

1. ITR COV AC Briefing Michael Willig Division Director, BIO-DEB

2. ITR Priority Area Innovative, high-risk and high-return multidisciplinary research 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.

3. 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 Priority Area

5. 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

6. 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

7. ITR Funding by Directorate

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. ITR COV RecommendationsC: Other Topics ITR has played a key role in launching interdisciplinary projects within NSF … • 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.)

16. 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