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The FY 2002 Budget Request for the Experimental
and Integrative Activities (EIA) Subactivity is $57.81 million,
an decrease of $3.14 million, or 5.2 percent, below the FY 2001
Current Plan of $60.95 million.
(Millions of Dollars)
| |
FY 2000 Actual |
FY 2001
CurrentPlan |
FY 2002 Request |
Change |
| Amount |
Percent |
| Experimental and Integrative Activities |
57.85
|
60.95
|
57.81
|
-3.14
|
-5.2%
|
| Total, EIA |
$57.85
|
$60.95
|
$57.81
|
-$3.14
|
-5.2%
|
The EIA Subactivity facilitates new ventures and
the evolution of CISE-related disciplines, and encourages activities
that cross traditional boundaries. Specifically, EIA promotes new
and typically multidisciplinary research initiatives, builds capacity
in terms of people and facilities, and assesses the impact of IT
research, education and technology on society. EIA has a balanced
portfolio across NSF's three strategic goals.
Approximately $25.0 million in multidisciplinary
research funding supports projects that cross the disciplinary boundaries
within CISE as well as core research projects that have application
outside of CISE areas. Approximately $20.0 million for instrumentation
and infrastructure efforts provides funding for groups of investigators
for equipment (such as high-performance computers, robots, or visualization
devices) and operations that enables multi-investigator research.
Education, human resources, and workforce programs provide approximately
$10.0 million to support research on uses of technology to improve
learning, the transfer of research advances into college and graduate
level curricula, and to increase the participation of under-represented
groups in educational and career paths in IT. EIA provides approximately
$2.0 million to support workshops, symposia, studies, travel and
international activities related to areas and issues of interest
to CISE and CISE grantees.
Among the successes resulting from prior EIA funding
are:
Carnegie Mellon University's VuMan series of
wearable computers allow a user to move through a house or campus,
while accessing a map, image database, or textual database. One
of the key problems is energy consumption. Employing a Theory
of Energy Locality method for analyzing the power consumption
of mobile computers, CMU researchers have reduced complexity,
weight, volume, and power consumption by a factor of four. This
was accomplished with an increase of over a factor of two in capability
and a reduction of 40 percent in design/fabrication effort.
The National Center for Sign Language and Gesture
Resources, a cooperative project of the University of Pennsylvania
and Boston University, has developed facilities for computerized
acquisition and analysis of American Sign Language video data.
The Center represents a unique collaboration between researchers
in linguistics and computer science toward the collection of a
linguistically valid, labeled, digital video database for the
study of sign language and gesture.
A longitudinal evaluation by the University of
Wisconsin shows the Distributed Mentor Project (DMP) to be spectacularly
successful at meeting its primary goal of increasing the number
of women entering graduate school in Computer Science and Engineering
(CS&E). The DMP project linked female undergraduate students
with volunteer faculty mentors in universities across the United
States. The evaluation conducted at Wisconsin showed that the
best male CS&E graduates were 10 times more likely to enter
graduate or professional school within one year of graduation
than a comparable group of female CS&E graduates. However,
for the DMP participants, over 50% were enrolled in graduate or
professional school the year following their graduation, exceeding
the enrollment rate for males.
Areas of emphasis for FY 2002 include:
Creating rapid response mechanisms to identify
and support new opportunities within and across traditional and
emerging research areas. EIA plans to expand its investments at
the intersection of information technology and biology research
and in information-technology-enhanced learning and teaching.
Within the biology and IT intersection, EIA will emphasize biomolecular
computing, biologically-inspired information technology, and bioinformatics
as well as coordinate CISE participation in the NSF-wide Biocomplexity
in the Environment priority area. EIA will also continue its investment
in the Digital Government and Data-Driven Application Systems
programs.
Organizing a portfolio of instrumentation and
infrastructure programs to provide research equipment generally
unavailable on individual research awards, ranging from specialized
instrumentation for small research groups to large-scale infrastructure
to nationally and internationally shared facilities, which are
closely tied to research. Participation by emerging, regionally
disadvantaged, and underrepresented groups will be ensured through
partnerships and special programs.
Focusing activities in education, human resources
and workforce on the underlying issues, needs and components of
teaching and learning, workforce needs, pipeline problems, and
underrepresented groups in information technology. The Information
Technology Workforce Program is the primary program in this area,
and EIA will continue to participate in many cross-directorate
activities, including the Combined Research Curriculum Development
(CRCD) program, the Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education
(GK-12), and in the Interagency Education Research Initiative
(IERI).
Priority activities for reallocated funding include:
Adding $2.0 million to support for research at
the biology-IT interface, where IT research can greatly benefit
biology (genomics, pathways, gene expression and function) and
where biology can benefit IT research (macromolecular computation,
hybrid devices, new modes and models for computation).
$800,000 to enhance the Research in Interactive
Education program to develop the research base for new means of
using IT for enhancing learning for any age group, in any setting,
for any learning goal, and at any convenient time and place.
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