Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Dear IIS Community,
Happy Pi Day! I’ve been serving as the Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems for the past 8 and a half months. It’s been super interesting to be at NSF, learning about how the organization does its business and doing what I can to support all you fabulous researchers who are carrying out amazing work in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, data management and analytics, and the related topics that fall under the IIS umbrella.
With this message, I’m kicking off another (another!?) communication channel between NSF and the research community. I’m sure no one wants more email, but let me explain. At NSF, I’m considered an IPA. I thought that stood for “India Pale Ale”, but in this context it means “Intergovernmental Personnel Act”. It basically means I am here for a limited time (2 to 4 years) while “on loan” from my home institution (Brown University’s CS department). Roughly half of the scientific staff at NSF are IPAs, from Program Officers, through Division Directors like me, and on up. You may wonder, why does NSF mix regular employees (aka “Feds”) with external people (IPAs)? I think one of the main reasons is that IPAs can help bridge the distance between the government bureaucracy and the academic scholars whose mission it is to serve. To put it simply, I can help translate between NSF and you.
So, on the Second Tuesday Every Month (STEM!), I’ll send out a message like this with the goal of helping to convey something about NSF that might be useful to you. In exchange, I hope you feel empowered to send me questions/comments/concerns that I might be able to address on behalf of the research community. Since I’m still on the faculty mailing list at Brown, I have one source of information about what’s on people’s minds. For example, one of my colleagues there shared a link to a Nature article that said that NSF is considering changing the review process to allow for Golden Tickets, a kind of unilateral reviewer override that can be used to rescue proposals that are exciting but maybe strike some reviewers as too risky. Is this true? The article quotes Erwin Gianchandani, who used to be part of our CISE directorate, but now heads up the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP). So, I asked him. He told me that the new Chips and Science Act explicitly directs him, in this role, to develop and test "diverse merit-review models and mechanisms". So, yes, it’s something that’s being looked at. But it’s not close to being used for CISE panels. There’s more developing and testing that’s going to happen, presumably in TIP first.
Maybe that’s helpful. But maybe there’s something else on your mind. Let me know! Until then, I’ll be on the lookout for information to share.
-Michael