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 field is related to the number of applicants from that field?  And did you know that CISE has dramatically fewer applicants than other fields of comparable size?  Once again, we are killing ourselves.  Get with it!!

Third, many of you are aware that Jeannette Wing will be leaving CISE on June 30, after a truly spectacular run as CISE AD that has led to a dramatic increase in the recognition of our field as a “player” and as central to advances across-the-board.  We’ll have more to say about that in a subsequent post.  You may not know, though, that Debbie Crawford also is leaving her role as Deputy AD.  Debbie, too, is a star — she has been an extraordinary contributor.  In addition, all three CISE Division Directors are nearing the ends of their IPA appointments – Sampath Kannan (CCF), Ty Znati (CNS), and Haym Hirsh (IIS).  Sampath, Ty, and Haym — like Jeannette and Debbie — are tough acts to follow.  For the past few years we have had some of our very best in leadership positions at CISE.  Nothing could be more important than continuing this trend.  It’s all about leadership.

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 one where the reviewer said the proposed research had already been done and the results published by a different investigator, concluding, “This is not a good proposal, but this is no time to reduce funding to Field Y.” (Field Y receives considerably more funding than most fields, and has for a long time.)

This story contains a lesson about the ecology of review processes. Reviewers rate proposals to determine which proposals to support, but that’s not the only use for their ratings. Leaders of funding agencies do not allocate funding to fields by reading all the agency’s proposals and reviews. They use summary measures. One of these is “proposal pressure,” meaning the number of highly-rated proposals within a field that cannot be funded because the field’s budget is too small. A field with more highly-rated proposals than it can support is “under-funded.” Right?

We in the computing research field often eviscerate the proposals of our colleagues during proposal reviews. Why are we so fratricidal? Is it to demonstrate how tough we are? If so, we’re hurting ourselves. People from other fields are happy to have fratricidal computing researchers in competition for interdisciplinary grants because there will be more funding for everyone else!

There are two kinds of responsibility in proposal review. One separates good proposals from weak proposals to ensure that good proposals are funded. The other ensures that computing research holds its own in funding with other fields. The computing research field gets better when we criticize weak proposals and recommend improvements. The field does not get better when our criticisms of each other are so harsh that that computing researchers get less of the pie.

(Contributed by John Leslie King, University of Michigan)