COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING $529,100,000

The FY 2001 Budget Request for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Activity is $529.10 million, an increase of $140.68 million, or 36.2 percent, over the FY 2000 Current Plan of $388.42 million.

(Millions of Dollars)

Information technology is playing an increasingly important role in nearly every part of our lives, affecting science and engineering research and education, education in general, commerce, health, and national security. The federal investment in research has played a key part in developing early U.S. leadership in underlying computing, communications and information technologies and in applying these technologies to many areas of critical national importance. As part of a federal effort, CISE provides more than 50 percent of the total federal support for fundamental research in computer science at U.S. colleges and universities.

CISE continues to support major advances in information technology:

• Researchers at the University of California-Berkeley led the way in using commodity processors with newly available communications technology to develop cluster computers that achieved supercomputer performance at a fraction of supercomputer costs. The resulting system was used to develop the innovative Inktomi search engine that was adopted by several commercial search engines and to break the RSA 40-bit public-key crypto-system challenge. Cluster computing is now the most active model for developing supercomputers such as the ASCI red and blue machines.

• The interagency Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative has been highly successful. NSF support for high performance connections at more than 170 sites using the very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) network (operated by MCI Worldcom) and the Abilene network (operated by Internet2 and UCAID) has resulted in interest in high performance networking in both academia and industry. Enabled by fundamental advances in optical networking under federal support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NSF, the number of very high performance networks has increased and the available bandwidth has had phenomenal growth.

• CISE-supported research in Digital Libraries and related information management research has led to the WWW search engines that have become common tools in business, schools and homes; Lycos, Google, Webcrawler, and Inktomi were all developed from research supported by NSF. Longer-range research in these areas is developing new techniques to store, search and deliver video, audio and other data resources.

• The CISE-supported Distributed Mentor Project is increasing the pipeline of women advancing into graduate study in science and engineering. Participants in the program are 20 times more likely to continue to graduate or professional school than non-participants.

People are NSF's most important product. At NSF, placing research and learning hand in hand is our highest priority, and the people involved in our projects represent both the focus of our investments and the most important products of them. Across its programs, CISE provides support for almost 8,740 people, including students, researchers, post-doctorates, and trainees. Support for programs specifically addressing NSF's Strategic Goal of "People -- A diverse, internationally competitive and globally-engaged workforce of scientists, engineers and well-prepared citizens" totals more than $38 million in FY 2001, an increase of 40.4 percent over FY 2000. Moreover, about 37 percent of the funding for research grants --an amount approaching $135 million in FY 2001-- provides support for researchers and students, including more than 4,550 post-doctorates, trainees, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Information Technology Research (ITR)

Since 1994, information technology (IT) has been responsible for a third of the nation's economic expansion, primarily due to advances in fundamental understanding of computing, communications, and information. The Internet, Web browsers, software for medical, scientific, educational, and business applications, as well as many other features of daily life are rooted in the basic research achievements of the past few decades. In the future, information technology will have an even greater impact on the quality of our lives, the state of the economy and national security. Recent recommendations of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) highlighted the fragile ground on which this progress is built, and expressed alarm that under-funding of long-term basic research will seriously undercut future U.S. leadership in information technology and efforts dependent on it. PITAC made strong recommendations concerning the efforts in research, infrastructure and education and training needed to maintain the present U.S. leadership position. In response, in FY 2000, NSF was chosen as the lead agency among participating agencies in the new federal Information Technology Research and Development program. NSF's Information Technology Research initiative began in FY 2000 with a $90.0 million investment in basic research, and $36.0 million for a new Terascale Computing System provided through the Major Research Equipment Account.

Funding within CISE for the Foundation's ITR initiative will total $190.0 million in FY 2001, an increase of $100.0 million. ITR continues the Foundation's effort to address computing, communications, information research, and related education and training and infrastructure efforts essential for maintaining the nation's preeminence in information technology research and its wider applications to all sectors of society. This program builds on and is integrated with prior CISE activities, complements and draws upon strong collaborative efforts among all NSF's research programs, and continues a long and successful history of federal interagency cooperation. Partner agencies in this multi-agency effort include DARPA, the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

In response to the need for more long-range IT research, the ITR initiative will support research that often entails a higher risk than that prevailing in established areas. In managing the award process, CISE will ensure that at least 10 percent of funding is used for these high-quality, higher-risk proposals.

In FY 2001, as part of the Information Technology Research initiative, CISE will focus on broad thematic, large-scale, long-term, basic computer science research challenges, such as:

• building "no-surprise," performance-engineered software and infrastructure systems,

• realizing broadband Internet access for tetherless devices,

• understanding, modeling, and predicting the behavior of networks,

• hardware/software co-design,

• multiplying individuals' physical and mental capabilities,

• meeting, working, and collaborating in cyberspace,

• building a ubiquitous content infrastructure for seamless retrieval of available information, and

• empowering computational discovery.

In addition, CISE will initiate the following new activities under ITR in FY 2001:

• Support of $3.5 million will be provided to initiate the College Connections project, to develop network middleware and support connectivity to facilitate access to high bandwidth networks for four-year colleges across the country. This will permit access to the latest advances in networked scientific tools, databases, digital libraries and other resources. It will enable the start of an interactive education network.

• The IT for Biology project will invest $1.0 million in areas of biological research that are poised to benefit from research advances in IT such as genomics, protein folding and function determination, or molecular design.

• A new research program to determine the fundamental reasons for lower participation in IT education paths and careers by women and minorities will be started. This research may provide the knowledge to develop effective remediation activities for the future. $4.0 million will be invested in this activity in FY 2001.

• Research in Interactive Education will be funded at $2.0 million to develop the research base for new means of delivering education to traditional students as well as non-traditional students, such as employees developing new skills. This research, conducted in coordination with workforce programs, will develop new models of delivering high quality education opportunities to all areas and sectors of the nation.

• Mathematical methods underlie much of the research in areas as diverse as software methods, high confidence systems, large scale networking, and high-end computing. $10.0 million will support fundamental research in projects that create the mathematical understanding for ITR.

Nanoscale Science and Engineering

CISE will contribute $5.0 million to Nanoscale Science and Engineering through research on quantum computing, self-assembly of biomolecular computer components, algorithms for extracting signals from noise in atomic force microscopy, nano-robotics, design automation tools, and nano-scale cellular automata.

21 ^st Century Workforce

CISE provides $1.25 million in support for the Foundation's 21 ^st Century Workforce initiative through a range of programs that encourage creative approaches to meeting the workforce requirements for IT in the new century. These include the Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI) and the NSF Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12). In addition, CISE will provide $100,000 in FY 2001 for activities that lead to understanding the reasons for lower participation rates among minorities and women in IT-related education and career paths.

STRATEGIC GOALS

CISE's support for ongoing and new activities contributes to NSF efforts to achieve its strategic goals, as well as to the administration and management activities necessary to achieve those goals:

(Millions of Dollars)

1 Includes only costs charged to the R&RA Appropriation

Ideas

Support for discovery at and across the frontiers of science and engineering and connections to its use in the service of society underlies all the research areas in the CISE activity. Across CISE, projects that support research as well as the university training environment are the highest priority in CISE. As part of this support for discovery, funding for ITR will increase from $90.0 million to $190.0 million, with approximately two-thirds of support going towards individual and small group research projects and one-third towards small centers.

An additional $20.95 million will support disciplinary research outside the ITR program. This additional support will enable increased award size and duration. Priorities in CISE for increased effort outside of ITR include:

• Increased support of $2.0 million for research in cognitive neuroscience that will increase the understanding of how the human brain performs computational types of actions such as recognizing faces or voices. This knowledge may one day allow computers to perform such tasks as easily as humans.

• $5.0 million to fund research, demonstrations and technical assistance on ways to make technology more accessible. These assistive technologies will enable a greater spectrum of the citizenry - the elderly, disabled, and those with less experience with computer systems - to use and benefit from IT innovations in computing and communications.

• Increased support for research in methods for storage and access of scientific data to improve usage and access of existing resources; expanded research on visualization and analysis for large, scientific data sets; and research on new mechanisms for computing such as quantum devices and DNA or chemical based techniques.

• Increasing fundamental research on networking by $8.45 million to $25.47 million to address needs such as increased users, new types of services, increased complexity of protocols, and wireless networked devices.

• Providing approximately $9.0 million, an increase of $2.0 million, to fund research in areas such as genome sequencing and database tools, protein motif recognition, biomolecular computing, computational biology, and hydrology and ecosystems modeling.

Another priority area is Critical Infrastructure Protection. An increase of $4.0 million, with $2.86 million additional support expected under ITR, will bring total support to $29.05 million in FY 2001. This support will provide for increased research in networking, high performance computing and software that will enable computer and communications systems to be safer, more reliable, and free from intrusions.

In FY 2001, CISE expects to increase the average size of awards by 10 percent and the average duration of awards to 3.3 years. These efforts will simultaneously contribute to increasing the efficiency of the Foundation's merit review process, and achieve greater cost-effectiveness for both NSF and the research community.

CISE-supported centers include:

(Millions of Dollars)

Two continuing STCs with CISE support are:

• The Center for Cognitive Science (University of Pennsylvania), which is jointly funded by CISE with the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Activity; and . The Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization (University of Utah, Cornell University, Brown University, California Institute of Technology, and University of North Carolina).
  

• The Information Technology Centers will be initiated in FY 2000, with additional awards planned for FY 2001. Support will be for fundamental research in IT that spans computer and information science and engineering, and encompasses scientific applications or addresses areas of social, ethical and workforce issues in IT.

People

CISE places a high priority on programs to develop the IT workforce through efforts to increase graduate training and the attractiveness of university careers for computer scientists and engineers, to increase participation of under-represented groups in the workforce, and to enhance the ability of all citizens to benefit from the expanded use of computing and communications technologies.

(Millions of Dollars)

In FY 1999, CISE initiated an activity to identify and understand the reasons for lower participation rates among women and minorities in IT careers. In FY 2001, CISE will fund research on the underlying issues of lower participation rates among women and minorities including components of teaching and learning, workforce needs, and retention issues in IT majors at colleges.

CISE also participates in a range of other programs to improve education, including providing $2.25 million for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

Tools

In FY 2001, CISE will increase support for infrastructure programs:

(Millions of Dollars)

Support for PACI will total $70.83 million in FY 2001, level with FY 2000. With the transition from the Supercomputer Centers program completed and all partnering activities fully operational the program will continue broadening and accelerating the capability of the research community to utilize this advanced technology to work on cutting edge research problems in all scientific disciplines.

An increase of $5.0 million for Terascale Computing Systems will provide operations support for these new systems described under the Major Research Equipment account. These efforts will complement PACI by supporting a major strengthening of the high performance computational capability needed for IT research and applications.

Support for ANI will total $45.40 million in FY 2001, an increase of $1.50 million over FY 2000. ANI participates in the interagency Next Generation Internet (NGI) program, and complements the universityled Internet2 effort. Within NGI, the focus is on high performance connectivity between academic research institutions, contributing to basic infrastructure for high-end research applications, and taking a major role in developing the national scalable high-performance network infrastructure for the U.S. research and education community. In FY 2001, ANI will stress extending the reach of high performance networking by:

• Providing access to high performance networking to additional research and educational sites;

• Developing new methods for access technology that will extend high performance networks to difficult to reach sites and closer to end users; and

• Developing new middleware for applications to better serve the requirements of networked applications.

Administration and Management

Administration and Management provides for administrative activities necessary to enable NSF to achieve its strategic goals. This includes the cost of Intergovernmental Personnel Act appointments, contractors performing administrative functions and, in FY 2001, travel by staff in the program offices.

BUDGET PRESENTATION

NSF has previously organized its budget presentation around four key program functions - Research Project Support, Research Facilities, Education and Training, and Administration and Management. In order to link the FY 2001 Budget Request to the NSF Strategic Plan, we have organized the FY 2001 Budget Request around the strategic outcome goals of Ideas, People and Tools, as well as the Administration and Management activities necessary to achieve these goals.

The table below provides an FY 2001 crosswalk for Computer and Information Science and Engineering between funding for the strategic goals and the key program functions.

(Millions of Dollars)