Smart Health & Well-being (NSF)

Through the Smart Health and Wellbeing (SHB) Program, NSF seeks to address fundamental technical and scientific issues that would support much needed transformation of healthcare from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive, proactive, evidence-based, person-centered and focused on wellbeing rather than disease. The issues to be addressed include, but are not limited to, sensor technology, networking, information and machine learning technology, modeling cognitive processes, system and process modeling, and social and economic issues. Effective technology-based solutions must satisfy a multitude of constraints arising from clinical needs, social interactions, cognitive limitations, barriers to behavioral changes, heterogeneity of data, semantic mismatch and limitations of current cyberphysical systems. The high degree of complexity and broad range of the problems require multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers to identify and address barriers limiting quality of life, independence for chronically ill and elder individuals, and other aspects of wellbeing. Fundamental technological advances are also needed to understand the impediments that prevent people from engaging in health-promoting life styles including diet and exercise and from participating in their healthcare decisions.Proposers are invited to submit proposals in two project classes, which are defined as follows:Type I: Exploratory Projects (EXP) - $200,000 to $600,000 total budget with durations from two to three years; andType II: Integrative Projects (INT) - $600,001 to $2,000,000 total budget with durations from four to five yearsA more complete description of the project classes can be found in section II. Program Description, of this document.

Date due: February 21, 2012

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Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR)

The Department of Energy announces the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 Phase I (Release 2). The objectives of these programs include increasing private sector commercialization of technology developed through Department of Energy supported research and development (R&D), stimulating technological innovation in the private sector, and improving the return on investment from Federally-funded research for economic and social benefits to the nation. DOE will support high-quality research or R&D on advanced concepts concerning important mission-related scientific or engineering problems and opportunities that are likely to lead to significant public benefit from promising research.

Amount: $150,000 (must partner with a small business)

Date due: January 31, 2012

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Scholarly Editions and Translations

The Department of Energy announces the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs for Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 Phase I (Release 2). The objectives of these programs include increasing private sector commercialization of technology developed through Department of Energy supported research and development (R&D), stimulating technological innovation in the private sector, and improving the return on investment from Federally-funded research for economic and social benefits to the nation. DOE will support high-quality research or R&D on advanced concepts concerning important mission-related scientific or engineering problems and opportunities that are likely to lead to significant public benefit from promising research.

Amount: $150,000 (must partner with a small business)

Date due: January 31, 2012

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Cyberlearning: Transforming Education

Through the Cyberlearning: Transforming Education program, NSF seeks to integrate advances in technology with advances in what is known about how people learn to better understand how people learn with technology and how technology can be used productively to help people learn, through individual use and/or through collaborations mediated by technology;better use technology for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and managing data to shed light on learning, promoting learning, and designing learning environments; anddesign new technologies for these purposes, and advance understanding of how to use those technologies and integrate them into learning environments so that their potential is fulfilled.Of particular interest are technological advances that allow more personalized learning experiences, draw in and promote learning among those in populations not served well by current educational practices, allow access to learning resources anytime and anywhere, and provide new ways of assessing capabilities. It is expected that Cyberlearning research will shed light on how technology can enable new forms of educational practice and that broad implementation of its findings will result in a more actively-engaged and productive citizenry and workforce.Cyberlearning awards will be made in three research categories, each focusing on a different stage of research and development: Exploratory (EXP), Design and Implementation (DIP), and Integration and Deployment (INDP). The Cyberlearning program will also support small Capacity-Building Projects (CAP) and a Cyberlearning Resource Center (CRC).

Amount: $2.5 million

Date due: February 12, 2012

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Partnerships for International Research (PIRE)

Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) is an NSF-wide program that supports international activities across all NSF supported disciplines. The primary goal of PIRE is to support high quality projects in which advances in research and education could not occur without international collaboration. PIRE seeks to catalyze a higher level of international engagement in the U.S. science and engineering community. International partnerships are essential to addressing critical science and engineering problems. In the global context, U.S. researchers and educators must be able to operate effectively in teams with partners from different nations and cultural backgrounds. PIRE promotes excellence in science and engineering through international collaboration and facilitates development of a diverse, globally-engaged, U.S. science and engineering workforce. This PIRE competition will focus exclusively on the NSF-wide investment area of Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES). The SEES effort focuses on interdisciplinary topics that will advance sustainability science, engineering and education as an integrative approach to the challenges of adapting to environmental, social and cultural changes associated with growth and development of human populations, and attaining a sustainable energy future.

Amount: $4 million across 5 years

Date due: Preliminary proposals due October 19, 2011

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Digging into Data (Information Sciences)

The creation of vast quantities of Internet-accessible digital data and the development of techniques for large-scale data analysis have led to remarkable new discoveries in genetics, astronomy, and other fields, and—importantly—connections between different academic disciplines. The Digging into Data Challenge seeks to discover how these new research techniques might also be applied to questions in the humanities and social sciences. New techniques of large-scale data analysis allow researchers to discover relationships, detect discrepancies, and perform computations on so-called “big data” sets that are so large that they can be processed only by using computing resources and computational methods that were developed and made economically affordable within the past few years. This “data deluge” has arisen not just from the capture and storage of data on everyday transactions such as Internet searches, consumer purchases, cell phone records, “smart” metering systems and sensors, but also from the digitization of all types of media, with books, newspapers, journals, films, artworks, and sound recordings being digitized on a massive scale. It is possible to apply data linkage and analysis techniques to large and diverse data collections, including survey data, economic data, digitized newspapers, books, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources. How might these techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world? To encourage innovative approaches to this question, eight international research organizations are organizing a joint grant competition to focus the attention of the social sciences, humanities, library, archival, and information sciences communities on large-scale data analysis and its potential applications. The four goals of the initiative are * to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis that focus on applications for the humanities and social sciences; * to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, library, archive, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis; * to promote international collaboration among both researchers and funders; and * to ensure efficient access to and sharing of the materials for research by working with data repositories that hold large digital collections.

Amount: $175,000

Date due: June 16, 2011

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University Research Instrumentation Program (Department of Defense)

The Department of Defense (DoD) announces the Fiscal Year 2011 Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP), a part of the University Research Initiative (URI). DURIP is designed to improve the capabilities of U.S. institutions of higher education (hereafter referred to as “universities”) to conduct research and to educate scientists and engineers in areas important to national defense, by providing funds for the acquisition of research equipment. This announcement seeks proposals to purchase instrumentation in support of research in areas of interest to the DoD. A central purpose of the DURIP is to provide equipment to enhance research-related education. Therefore proposals must address the impact of the equipment on the institution’s ability to educate students, through research, in disciplines important to DoD missions.

Amount: $50,000 - $1,000,000 (equipment grants)

Date due: September 14, 2010

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