ITR COV AC Briefing

Dr. Lesia Crumption Young

ITR COV Member

ENG AdCom Member

May 11-12, 2005

ITR Program Background

5 years as an NSF Priority Area Consistent programmatic scope

Interdisciplinary IT research and education Innovative, high-risk, high-pay-off research and education

Changing Foci FY00 – Fundamental IT research and education

FY01 – Application of IT to science and engineering challenges FY02 – Multidisciplinary IT challenges FY03 – Relationship between acquisition and utilization of

knowledge and IT tools FY04 – IT research for national priorities

ITR

COV

ITR COV Overview• ITR COV Structure:

Chair: Dr. Janie Irwin And 2 Co-Chairs: Dr. Larry Mayer and Dr. Shenda Baker 3 Team Leaders (one for each year) overseeing 3 teams of 10 or 11 members

each Dr. Ignacio Grossman Dr. Jim Beach Dr. Greg Moses

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

Demographics of 35 COV Members

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

NSF ITR Funding by Directorate

BIO CISE ENG GEO MPSSBE/OISE OPP

R&RASubtotal EHR MREFC

Total,NSF

FY 2000 90.00 $90.00 36.00 $126.00FY 2001 5.19 155.48 8.17 10.90 29.62 3.82 1.09 $214.27 2.00 44.90 $261.17FY 2002 6.08 173.51 10.23 12.16 32.66 4.36 1.22 $240.22 2.00 35.00 $277.22FY 2003 6.80 215.17 11.17 13.21 35.52 4.60 1.33 $287.80 2.48 44.83 $335.11FY 2004 7.50 218.07 10.31 14.56 38.57 5.15 1.55 $295.71 3.05 10.05 $308.80

Source: NSF Budget Thematics

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

Large Medium Small Total

Proposal Size

FY01-FY03 ITR Success Rate

FY01

FY02

FY03

Funding Rate, NSF Research Grants

ITR COV Agenda

Chunks of time devoted to: Learning about the ITR program from ITR Program

Directors Learning about the funded projects and their science and

education components by talking with Program Directors in poster sessions

Reading ITR awards and declines – small, medium and large

Working in teams to complete the year report Talking with the ADs about recommendations Working across teams to synthesize and prepare

executive summary

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 PD’s address both merit review criteria Different interpretations of what is meant by broader impact 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 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

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

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

Integrated ITR web site of projects 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 RecommendationsC: Other Topics, con’t

• 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.)

Vision for NSF and how interdisciplinary research fits into it for 2010? 2015?

Issues for Further Discussion

COV process isn’t designed to gather insights that enable “program Improvement” (ie. reactive, not proactive in nature)

COV process doesn’t encourage “critical” feedback from visitors

COV process revealed the lack of good business practices for standardizing program planning, solicitation development, etc. throughout the agency