HOT RESEARCH

Carnegie Mellon University Receives $5.5-Million in NSF ITR Awards

The National Science Foundation announced last Wednesday, September 13th, the first awards under its new $90 million Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative with four research projects from Carnegie Mellon University selected to receive $5,513,665 million dollars over the next three to five years. Carnegie Mellon University faculty and research scientists had more proposals selected than any other academic institution. The smiling principal investigators, their successful proposals with links to abstracts, and award amounts are:

• Guy Blelloch (Principal Investigator), "Algorithms: From Theory to Application," $600,000, three years.
• Hui Zhang (Principal Investigator), "Collaborative Research: Scalable Services for the Global Network," $1-million, five years.
• Omar Ghattas (Principal Investigator), "Simulation of Flows with Dynamic Interfaces on Multi-Teraflop Computers," $3,113,665, four years.
• Todd Mowry (Principal Investigator), "Static and Dynamic Techniques for Latency Hiding in Data-Intensive Applications," $800,000, three years.
• Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Principal Investigator), "ITR: Exploiting Remote Infrastructure for Mobile Information Access," $488,820, three years.
• Vladimir M. Brajovic (Principal Investigator), "ITR: Sensory Level Computation and Information Encoding for Robust Imaging," $333,742, three years.

In addition, Carnegie Mellon faculty and research scientists are also serving as Co-principal investigators on joint projects:

• Mary Shaw (Co-Principal Investigator), Kevin J. Sullivan (Principal Investigator) at the University of Virginia, "ITR: Strategic Software Design: Value-Driven Software Definition, Development, Deployment and Evolution," $1,360,000, three years.
• Roger Dannenberg (Co-Principal Investigator), Bill Birmingham (Principal Investigator) at the University of Michigan, "Exploiting Style as Retrieval and Classification Mechanism," $1,778,255, three years. Dr. Birmingham is also a Carnegie Mellon alumnus (Ph.D. Electrical Engineering).
• Sebastian Thrun (Co-Principal Investigator), University of Pittsburgh's Jacqueline Dunbar-Jacob (Principal Investigator), "ITR: Personal Robotic Assistants for the Elderly," $1,434,692, four years.

The ITR initiative, supported by President Clinton, looks to promote fundamental research and innovative applications of Information Technology as a way to continue and improve U.S. leadership in this area of growing importance to the economy.

"This initiative will help strengthen America's leadership in a sector that has accounted for one-third of U.S. economic growth in recent years," said President Bill Clinton. "High technology is generating jobs that pay 85 percent more than the average private sector wage. I am pleased that the National Science Foundation is expanding its investment in long-term information technology research. I urge the Congress to provide full funding for NSF so that they can continue to make these kinds of investments in America's future."

There was no shortage of good proposals, only money to fund them all. The NSF received 1400 proposals, selecting 15% to receive awards, including 62 large projects averaging $1 million per year for three to five years and 148 smaller projects each totaling $500,000 or less for up to three years. Large projects involve 44 institutions in 22 states, where as smaller projects involve 81 institutions in 32 states.

"The response has been overwhelming," said Ruzena Bajcsy, who heads the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). "Because fund requests by proposers exceeded $3.2 billion, there were many more worthwhile projects proposed than we are able to support. The volume and quality of proposals are strong evidence justifying our desire to triple NSF's ITR budget over the next five years."

The NSF has requested additional funding of $190 million for its fiscal 2001 ITR budget. Additionally, the second NSF ITR competition has already begun.