ITR COV AC Briefing
Michael Willig
Division Director, BIO-DEB
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 manmade.
ITR Priority Area
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 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
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
ITR
Funding by Directorate
BIO
FY 2000
FY 2001
FY 2002
FY 2003
FY 2004
5.19
6.08
6.80
7.50
CISE
90.00
155.48
173.51
215.17
218.07
Source: NSF Budget Thematics
ENG
GEO
MPS
SBE/
OISE
8.17
10.23
11.17
10.31
10.90
12.16
13.21
14.56
29.62
32.66
35.52
38.57
3.82
4.36
4.60
5.15
OPP
1.09
1.22
1.33
1.55
R&RA
Subtotal
$90.00
$214.27
$240.22
$287.80
$295.71
EHR MREFC
36.00
2.00
44.90
2.00
35.00
2.48
44.83
3.05
10.05
Total,
NSF
$126.00
$261.17
$277.22
$335.11
$308.80
FY01-FY03 ITR Success Rate
35%
30%
25%
20%
FY01
FY02
FY03
15%
10%
5%
0%
Large
Medium
Small
Proposal Size
Total
Funding Rate, NSF Research Grants
ITR
COV 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
ITR COV Recommendations
Part 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
ITR COV Recommendations
Part 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
ITR COV Recommendations
ITR 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
ITR COV Recommendations
C: 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
ITR COV Recommendations
C: 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.)
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