Attached is a new DoD directive, reinforcing and clarifying the role of fundamental research at universities.  Roughly speaking, the new DARPA policies governing fundamental research at universities are now being adopted across all of DoD.  This means no pre-publication reviews, no export controls, and no issues with foreign researchers, except in “rare and exceptional circumstances.” It’s remarkably how rapidly things are returning to a sane state!

(Contributed by Dr. Christine Alvarado, Harvey Mudd College) The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) annual summit took place last Tuesday through Thursday in Portland, OR. Hundreds of people dedicated to increasing the number of women in the IT field packed Portland’s Hotel Monaco and Intel’s Jones Farm campus to experience a stimulating three days of conversation and presentations on the state of women in information technology in education (K-12 and higher ed), industry, and government. For those not familiar with NCWIT, it is a non-profit coalition of organizations whose goal is to increase women’s participation in information technology. It is concerned with all sectors, and its member […]

The Computing Community Consortium was launched three years ago –- in the Spring of 2007. The “long version” of what we’ve been up to is detailed in a formal self-assessment submitted to NSF in the Summer of 2009. The “PowerPoint version” is contained in an overview slideset. Here, I’m going to focus on just a few specific activities, to argue the benefits of having our act together as a field. Broad agenda-setting During the transition period to the Obama administration, we had the opportunity to feed a number of “white papers” into the transition team’s planning process.  Thanks to the receptiveness of the incoming administration, these white papers had impact […]

Three quick notes … First, I can’t believe that there weren’t more comments on John King’s terrific post,  “Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews.”  This is serious business.  And it’s not “new news” — CISE has had the lowest average proposal scores in NSF for years.  We are killing ourselves in a misguided effort to show how smart we are.  (The number of “highly ranked proposals” that can’t be funded is, quite naturally, a criterion argued within NSF for the allocation of funds among Directorates.)  For god’s sake! Second, the NSF Graduate Fellowship awardees have recently been announced.  Did you know that the number of fellowships awarded to each […]

A friend of mine from Field X once served as a program officer at a major research funding agency. (Names changed to protect the innocent.) As part of a quality assurance scheme, he was asked to review the proposal process for Field Y. He was surprised that every proposal he looked at, whether funded or not, was rated very high. He asked the program officer for Field Y how proposals could be ranked if they were all rated so high. He was told to pay no attention to the rating, but to look at what the reviewer said. So my friend looked at a number of highly-rated proposals. He found […]