Focus on I.T. for the 21st Century

August 31, 1999 NSF PR 99-50

Media contact: Bill Noxon, (703) 306-1070, [email protected]
Program contact: Richard Hilderbrandt, (703) 306-1844, [email protected]

KNOWLEDGE-CENTERED AWARDS JUMP START NSF FOCUS ON I.T. FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

The National Science Foundation (NSF) this week awarded $50 million in grants for broad-based research in knowledge and distributed intelligence (KDI). The awards are for projects as varied as knowledge networking in biocomplexity, earthquake computer modeling and case studies in intellectual property.

The 31 grants to two dozen institutions in 20 states "clearly demonstrate the enormous impact that the explosive growth in computer technology has had across all areas of science and engineering," says Richard Hilderbrandt, NSF program manager for the multi-disciplinary awards. "These awards are a solid foundation for NSF's new initiative in information technology for the 21st Century (IT2)."

The far-reaching research awards include the University of California at Santa Barbara's Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. Researchers hope, through this network, to apply to societal issues a broadened understanding of biocomplexity and ecological systems. They will create and integrate information resources that may be drawn from many distributed, currently autonomous data repositories. The researchers believe this will also help create a new community of environmental scientists who will be able to focus attention on complex, multi-scale issues that previously were impractical, if not impossible, to study.

Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh is receiving three grants totaling almost $5 million. One project involves the development of computer simulations to model and forecast ground motion during earthquakes, focusing on the areas in and around Los Angeles and San Francisco. In a second award, researchers are developing a TalkBank data archiving system to provide social and behavioral scientists a new web-based tool for transcribed video and audio data on communicative interactions. Yet another grant will focus on the study of distance video communications and the impact on the quality of interactions among individuals using these technologies.

On another topic of great interest to scientists, the University of California at Berkeley will undertake an extensive study on intellectual property, looking at the issue from the standpoint of economic, legal, technical and rights management perspectives.

The Department of Commerce's National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) received the only grant in this group not awarded to a university. At NIST, scientists will develop a digital library of mathematical functions, a web accessible knowledge base of validated mathematical data. A key facet of this system will be the interactive features and internal/external links created that will allow for retrievals, searches and interactive visualizations among many other features.

"Most of these grants are split among at least two disciplines, with three or four disciplines often sharing in this research," Hilderbrandt said. The grants cover a three-year period.

-NSF-

Attachment: List of 1999 KDI awards.
LIST OF 1999 KDI AWARDS
STATE INSTITUTION SUMMARY AWARD
AZ Arizona State Univ. 3D Knowledge: Acquisition, $2,100,000
 Representation and Analysis
 in a Distributed Environment
CA Univ. of Calif. Economic, Legal, and $940,000
 Berkeley Technical Dimensions of Rights
 Management
CA Univ. of Calif. Virtual Environments to $1,000,000
 San Francisco Elucidate Strategies in
 Complex Spatial Problem Solving
CA Univ. of Calif. A Knowledge Network for $2,979,000
 Santa Barbara Biocomplexity 
 
CT Yale Univ. Coordinated Motion of $2,600,000
 Natural and Man-Made Groups
DE Univ. of Delaware Executing Genetic Algorithms $900,000
 Using DNA Genetic Materials
FL Univ. of Florida Multi-scale simulation $2,200,000
 including chemical reactivity
 in materials
IL Univ. of Illinois Intelligent Computational $1,700,000
 Chicago Genomic Analysis 
IL Univ. of Illinois Co-evolution of Knowledge $1,500,000
 Urbana Networks and 21st Century
 Organizational Forms
IL Univ. of Illinois Can Knowledge Be Distributed? $1,400,000
 Urbana The Dynamics of Knowledge in
 Interdisciplinary Alliances
IN Indiana Univ. The Internet Learning Forum: $1,473,300
 Bloomington Fostering and Sustaining
 Knowledge Networking
MD Johns Hopkins Accessing Large Distributed $2,500,000
 Univ. Archives in Astronomy and
 Particle Physics
MD National Inst. of Mathematical Foundations for $1,300,00
 Standards & Tech. a Networked Scientific
 (NIST) Knowledge Base
MA UMASS Visualization and Spatial $988,730
 Amherst Reasoning: Cognitive Models,
 Skill Acquisition and 
 Intelligent Tutors
MA UMASS Temporal Abstraction in $560,000
 Amherst Reinforcement Learning
MI Univ. of Michigan A Prototype Implementation $2,300,00
 of a TeraFlop-Class Predictive
 Space Weather Model
MI Univ. of Michigan Creating a Corpus of $2,040,000
 Learning-Situated Design
 Guidelines & Software Components
MN Univ. of Minnesota Building a Future for Software $488,000
 History
MO Washington Univ. An Astrophysics Simulation $2,200,000
 St. Louis Collaboratory 
NY Cornell Univ. Simulation and Modeling of $1,700,000
 Organic and Inorganic
 Non-crystalline Semiconductors
NY New York Univ. Unsteady Flows with Dynamic $2,400,000
 Boundaries 
 
NY Rensselaer Polytech Automated Design and $1,200,000
 Inst. Discovery of Novel Pharmaceuticals
NY State Univ. of N.Y. Knowledge Networking in the $1,000,000
 (SUNY) Albany Public Sector
 
NC Duke Univ. Brain-Machine Interfaces for $1,600,000
 Monitoring and Modeling 
 Sensorimotor Learning in Primates
OH Wright State Univ. Cross-Modal Analysis of $2,536,050
 Signal and Sense 
PA Carnegie Mellon Univ. Large-Scale Iversion-Based $2,131,000
 Modeling of Complex
 Earthquake Ground Motion
PA Carnegie Mellon Univ. The Importance of Shared $1,500,000
 Visual Environments
 Environments for Collaborative 
 Tasks
PA Carnegie Mellon Univ. TalkBank: A Multimodal $1,442,000
 Database of Communicative
 Interaction
RI Brown Univ. 3D Free-Form Models for $1,200,000
 Geometric Recovery and 
 Applications to Archaeology
 
WA Univ. of Washington Amorphous and Crystalline $1,200,000
 Ice Growth
 
WA Univ. of Washington A Framework for Particle $1,000,000
 Simulation from Proteins
 to Planetesimals