or select your discipline:
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- The National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense, through their Real-Time Machine Learning (RTML) programs, are teaming up to explore advances in energy-efficient hardware and machine learning architectures that can learn from a continuous stream of new data in real time.
- The NSF Science and Technology Centers program supports exceptionally innovative, complex research and education projects that require large-scale, long-term awards. The program focuses on creating new scientific paradigms, establishing entirely new scientific disciplines and developing transformative technologies which have the potential for broad scientific or societal impact.
- Read more of this week's featured opportunities
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ORD Opportunities: NSF's 10 Big Ideas, Part 3
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My previous columns on NSF’s
10 Big Ideas
provided an introduction to the rationale for and philosophy behind NSF’s multi-year research funding agenda.
NSF continues to issue solicitations based on the Big Ideas
and I will be highlighting some of these.
The Quantum Leap: Leading the Next Quantum Revolution supports research into interactions of quantum systems and next-generation technologies for sensing, computing, modelling, and communicating through quantum mechanics. NSF19-559,
Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes
, is intended to support development of large-scale interdisciplinary research projects to advance the frontiers of quantum information science and engineering.
There will be two types of awards
: 12-month Conceptualization Grants ($100-150K) to support teams planning future Institute proposals and 5-year Challenge Institute awards ($5M/yr for 5 yrs) to establish and run Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes. Letters of intent are required for both types of proposals; those for Conceptualization Grants are due April 1 and Round 1 QLCI proposals on June 3. There also are preliminary proposals required for QCLI proposals (due August 1). Full proposals for Conceptualization Grants are due June 3.
The interlocking and complementary nature of the 10 Big Ideas is exemplified in a new solicitation, NSF 19-556,
Signals in the Soil
, which is a collaboration of NSF with USDA NIFA and United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) and awards will be co-funded with those agencies. The NSF ENG, GEO, BIO, and CISE directorates are all participating and the projects proposed must include research that could be reviewed in at least two NSF directorates or by one NSF directorate and NIFA. In this,
Signals in the Soil
resembles the former INFEWS program.
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- Join the Global Food Systems "It's All About Water" lecture Thursday, March 21 from noon to 1:00 p.m. in 137 Waters Hall. This month's speaker is Mary Knapp, state climatologist. Her topic will be monitoring rainfall. Find more information.
- The NSF EPSCoR Regional Outreach: All About Research Center Programs meeting will be held on April 2 in Mobile, Alabama. This event will be attended by up to five NSF Center Program Officers and two to three Center Directors who will provide extensive information about the various Centers sponsored by the NSF. Learn more here.
- K-State Libraries will host a workshop on managing research citations and references at 1:30 p.m. Monday, March 25 in room 1053 of the Business Administration Building. This hands-on workshop introduces the essentials of citation manager tools and will introduce examples such as Zotero and Mendeley. Computers will be provided. Learn more here.
- Join the last KSCI Workshop of the semester, "It's Not You, It's Me," at noon on Thursday, April 11 in 121 Eisenhower Hall. Community partners are essential to successful public engagement. This workshop will introduce tools and strategies that researchers can use to engage partners for impact (so they don’t have to break up). Find more information and register here.
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Get ready for SciComm 2019 at K-State!
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The Kansas Science Communication Initiative will co-host the SciComm 2019 Conference with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on March 22-24 on the Kansas State campus.
This conference is open to students, faculty, postdoc researchers, and media professionals.
Attend to learn more about:
- Science communication research
- Collaboration between scientists and science media
- Visual thinking strategies for science
- Storytelling (the story: your research)
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Agency news and trending topics
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New study of NIH funding says women over all get smaller grants than men, even when controlling for research potential.
“Publish or perish” is a law of academe. In the sciences, that law might as well be, “Get funding or perish.” And funding is harder and harder to get, with federal research dollars on the decline. Yet in this Darwinian climate, it’s not exactly survival of the fittest, according to new research that says women get smaller grants than men.
The study
, published in JAMA, looks at National Institutes of Health grants from 2006 to 2017. Female first-time principal investigators received a median grant of $126,615, across all grant and institution types during that period.
New HIV infections declined by 30 percent in southern African communities where health workers conducted house-to-house voluntary HIV testing, referred people who tested positive to begin HIV treatment according to local guidelines, and offered other proven HIV prevention measures to those who tested negative. Local guidelines evolved during the study from offering HIV treatment based on immune health to offering immediate treatment for all.
No human, or team of humans, could possibly keep up with
the avalanche of information
produced by many of today’s physics and astronomy experiments. Some of them record terabytes of data every day—and the torrent is
only increasing
. The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the mid-2020s, will generate about as much data traffic each year as the entire internet. The deluge has many scientists turning to
artificial intelligence
for help. With minimal human input, AI systems such as artificial neural networks—computer-simulated networks of neurons that mimic the function of brains—can plow through mountains of data, highlighting anomalies and detecting patterns that humans could never have spotted.
The Trump Administration’s tumultuous presidency has brought a flurry of changes—both realized and anticipated—to U.S. environmental policy. Many of the actions roll back Obama-era policies that aimed to curb
climate change
and limit environmental pollution, while others threaten to limit federal funding for science and the environment.
It’s a lot to keep track of, so National Geographic will be maintaining an abbreviated timeline of the Trump Administration’s environmental actions and policy changes, as well as reactions to them.
Debate over the future of scholarly publishing felt remote to Kathryn M. Jones, an associate professor of biology at Florida State University — that is, until she attended a Faculty Senate meeting last year. There she learned that the library might renegotiate its $2-million subscription with the publishing behemoth Elsevier, which would limit her and her colleagues’ access to groundbreaking research. Horror sank in. Like other experimental scientists, Jones regularly skims articles published in subscription journals to plan future experiments. What would happen if she couldn’t access that body of important work with the click of a button?
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k-state.edu/research
researchweekly@k-state.edu
785.532.5110
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