At last week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee (AC) for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director Keith Marzullo delivered a presentation summarizing the Foundation’s research infrastructure programs, notably the Foundation-wide Major Research Infrastructure (MRI) program and CISE-specific Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program. Marzullo’s talk, and the ensuing discussion, served to illustrate that both initiatives constitute great opportunities for the CISE research community.
According to the solicitations:
The Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) serves to increase access to shared scientific and engineering instruments for research and research training in our Nation’s institutions of higher education, museums, science centers, and not-for-profit organizations… To accomplish these goals, the MRI program assists with the acquisition or development of shared research instrumentation that is, in general, too costly and/or not appropriate for support through other NSF programs.
The CISE Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program drives discovery and learning in the computing disciplines by supporting the creation, enhancement and operation of world-class computing research infrastructure. Further, through the CRI program CISE seeks to ensure that individuals from a diverse range of academic institutions, including minority-serving and predominantly undergraduate institutions, have access to such infrastructure. The CRI program supports two classes of awards: Institutional Infrastructure (II) and Community Infrastructure (CI).
Marzullo’s slide deck — available after the jump — emphasizes key attributes of the MRI and CRI solicitations, provides some sample instrument types for the CISE community that would fall within the scope of these two programs, and highlights exemplar funded projects…
» Read more: Funding Research Infrastructure for the CISE Community
Human language is both rich and ambiguous. When we hear or read words, we resolve meanings to mental representations, for example recognizing and linking names to the intended persons, locations or organizations. Bridging words and meaning — from turning search queries into relevant results to suggesting targeted keywords for advertisers — is also Google’s core competency, and important for many other tasks in information retrieval and natural language processing. We are happy to release a resource, spanning 7,560,141 concepts and 175,100,788 unique text strings, that we hope will help everyone working in these areas [more after the jump]…
