ITR COV AC Briefing

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ITR COV AC Briefing

• Michael Willig
• Division Director, BIO-DEB

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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.
  

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ITR Priority Area
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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 years 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

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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

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ITR Funding by Directorate
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ITRAward Distribution
Cummulative 3-Year Totals (2001 - 2003)
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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

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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

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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 PDs
• 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

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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

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ITR COV RecommendationsC Other Topics

• Future large initiatives like ITR should have
  appropriate, assigned NSF staffing levels
• Capture and transfer what PDs 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

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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.)

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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