NSF
Broader
Impact
Bill Pugh
NSF (Jan - Jun 2011)
Univ. Of Maryland
Google
Nothing official
• Nothing has been decided or announced about how
NSF will implement provisions of the America Competes
Act
• I don't speak for NSF
• Lots of people have used this as an opportunity to
encourage and discuss broader impact and outreach,
and advocate for their vision of broader impact
• Broader impact and outreach is a good thing
Broader Impact at NSF
current status
• Proposals are evaluated in terms of intellectual merit
and broader impact
• Proposals with weak intellectually merit, as evaluated
by panel, don't get funded
• Proposals get returned without review if they don't
explicitly mention broader impact
• Broader impact can make a difference in ranking
competitive proposals near the funding cutoff
How much of a
difference?
• Fund rate is perhaps 20-25%
• In panel with 30 proposals, might fund 6-8 proposals
• Might be 1-3 proposals nearly tied for intellectual
merit
• Strong broader impact might move you to the top of
that group
Broader Impact via
research
• Almost anyone publishing at ICSE can claim to have broader
impact via their research
• (1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United States
• (8) Increased national security
• Can improve impact by plans to make artifacts produced via
research publicly available
• software, data sets
• Also helpful to discuss measures to ensure real world relevance
Outreach broader
impact
• Lots of ways to have broader impact via outreach of
many kinds
• Many people assume that new NSF rules will allow
for broader impact sidecars
Broader impact
side cars
• Broader impact effort not connected to proposal
research
• Doesn't need to be original or innovative; being
successful is also important
• Can be participation in existing departmental or
campus program
• Can allocate funds for outreach activities and/or
evaluation
Broader impact
side cars
• I expect that if new rules allow for BI sidecars, most
proposals in software engineering won't have them
• But some PI's are very enthusiastic and motivated to
do outreach activities
• This will provide them with opportunities put that
energy and ideas into their NSF proposals and be
rewarded for it
Volunteer to serve on
an NSF panel
• Program managers are always gets looking for people to
serve on panels
• Particularly need help identifying nand faculty and postdocs
• Great way to serve the community, learn how the process
works, and perhaps influence the work that gets funded
• For software engineering, contact Sol Greenspan
([email protected])
• I'll be gone by the end of June