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, 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

ITR Award Distribution Totals over ’01, ’02, ‘03

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 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 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 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 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 Recommendations C: 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