Slots: Institutions are limited to one CIP (CI Professionals) proposal per CyberTraining program competition only. The other two categories are not institutionally limited. Only apply to the ORIF portal if you plan on applying to the CI Professionals category of this solicitation.
Deadlines
Internal Deadline: Closed.
LOI: Not required
External Deadline: January 18, 2024
Recurring Deadlines: Third Thursday in January, Annually Thereafter
Award Information
Award Type: Standard Grant or Continuing Grant or Cooperative Agreement
Estimated Number of Awards: 12 to 18
Up to 4 Pilot, 8 Small and 3 Medium Implementation, and 3 CIP awards are anticipated.
Anticipated Award Amount: $21,500,000. Estimated program budget, number of awards and average award size/duration are subject to the availability of funds.
Who May Serve as PI: To ensure relevance to community needs and to facilitate adoption, those proposals of interest to one or more domain divisions must include at least one PI/co-PI with expertise relevant to the targeted research discipline. All proposals shall include at least one PI/co-PI with expertise relevant to OAC.
Link to Award: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22574/nsf22574.htm
Process for Limited Submissions
PIs must submit their application as a Limited Submission through the Office of Research Application Portal: https://rii.usc.edu/oor-portal/.
Materials to submit include:
- (1) Single Page Proposal Summary (0.5” margins; single-spaced; font type: Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia typeface; font size: 11 pt). Page limit includes references and illustrations. Pages that exceed the 1-page limit will be excluded from review.
- (2) CV – (5 pages maximum)
Note: The portal requires information about the PIs and Co-PIs in addition to department and contact information, including the 10-digit USC ID#, Gender, and Ethnicity. Please have this material prepared before beginning this application.
Purpose
The goals of this solicitation are to (i) ensure broad adoption of CI tools, methods, and resources by the research community in order to catalyze major research advances and to enhance researchers’ abilities to lead the development of new CI; (ii) integrate core literacy and discipline-appropriate advanced skills in advanced CI as well as computational and data-driven methods for advancing fundamental research, into the Nation’s undergraduate and graduate educational curriculum/instructional materials; and (iii) build communities of research CI professional staff to deploy, manage, and collaboratively support the effective use of research CI, as well as establish career paths for those staff within and across institutions and S&E disciplines. In the short term, projects must either catalyze potentially transformative fundamental research in specific NSF-supported disciplines with innovative, scalable, informal/formal training and educational activities; result in curriculum/instructional material that is integrated into undergraduate and graduate courses, serving as templates for adoption by other institutions and informing best practices and institutional and disciplinary curriculum/instructional material; and/or support CI professionals in not only a research support role, but rather in an integral role that centers on partnering with research projects within the institution and across institutions on shared research goals. In the long term, projects should contribute to the larger goals of an educational and research ecosystem that enables computational and data-driven science for all scientists and engineers, with an understanding of computation as the third pillar and data-driven science as the fourth pillar of the scientific discovery process (Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020), in addition to the traditional first and second pillars of theory and experimentation, respectively. Furthermore, in the long term, projects should contribute toward ubiquitous educational infrastructure for online, dynamic, personalized lessons, and certifications in CI and other multidisciplinary areas that enable broad use by the NSF research communities of advanced CI tools and resources and catalyze potentially transformative fundamental research (NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Cyberlearning and Workforce Development Report, Chapter 1, Continuous Collaborative Computational Cloud in Higher Education, 2011), while also helping to create a diverse and sustainable community of skilled CI professionals and broadening CI contributions and adoption from underrepresented groups.
The CyberTraining program focuses on three overlapping scientific communities, and projects should target one or more of these communities. [ORIF is only accepting pre-proposals for the following category]:
- CI Professionals: This is the community of research CI and professional staff who deploy, manage, and collaboratively support effective use of research CI. A CI Professionals-related project can address technical and research CI professional skills and more generally career development of current and future CI Professionals, including undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research scientists. However, a CI Professionals-specific project would target integration of current CI Professionals into research projects and the institutional support of long-term career paths for CI Professionals.
CI Professionals include the information technology professionals, scientists, and engineers who work closely with the computational and data-enabled scientific and engineering researchers at colleges and universities, supercomputing and other centers, and other research institutions. Examples of CI Professionals include CI system administrators, CI research support staff, research software engineers, and CI facilitators, and may also include computational research scientists and engineers and non-tenure-track faculty.
NSF anticipates proposals for informal/formal training and education, including retraining and cross-training, or for curricular activities, on topics related to use of methods and resources for advanced CI as well as computational and data-driven S&E. NSF also anticipates proposals to create or strengthen communities that support CI professionals as they contribute to the research enterprise, providing technical expertise, leadership, and engagement at the institutional level in research and educational pursuits. Training and education proposals are anticipated to span all levels, from basic literacy to advanced, and focus on addressing the emerging needs of fundamental research communities and resolving outstanding bottlenecks, while CIP proposals are anticipated to provide support for CI professionals to participate in the research enterprise and for institutions to establish long-term career paths for those professionals. CIP proposals can engage such professionals within a single institution or across multiple institutions, and/or can focus on a single S&E discipline or span multiple disciplines. The activities can include retraining and cross-training of the faculty mentors and course instructors themselves to keep up with the dynamic knowledge landscape, as one of the ways for obtaining a multiplier effect. For student training and education, a key concern is not to increase the time to degree. For CIP proposals, a key goal is to build long-term sustainable career paths within and across institutions.
Visit our Institutionally Limited Submission webpage for more updates and other announcements.