Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Dear IIS Community,
If you’re on the IIS mailing list (oh wait, of course you are!), you get a lot of mail from Wendy Nilsen. I myself have 170 messages from her dating back to November 2014. (That’s just the pre-NSF me. Since getting to NSF, I have a lot more. I just don’t know how to ask Outlook to count them.) Getting to know Wendy has been a high point for me at NSF, so I thought it might be nice to tell you a little bit about her.
Wendy’s PhD is in Child Psychology. While that might help explain why the two of us get along so well, it raises the question of how she ended up as the deputy division director for Information and Intelligent Systems. Her journey went something like this: child psychology and behavior (understanding how early traumatic experiences impact how kids cope), behavior change (looking at interventions that can help people make more healthy choices), mobile health for behavior change (specifically looking at how apps can help people make more healthy choices), information systems for mobile health (supporting the technology on which such apps can be built), information and intelligent systems (supporting the community creating this and other technology). If you ask Wendy if she is a computer scientist, she says, “No, but I play one on TV”. But the fact is that she built up expertise in many computational areas through her work in health information technology: networks, databases, human-computer interaction, AI/ML, and more. And her background in health helps keep our community honest and grounded. After all, it’s not enough to have a cool piece of technology and apply it to healthcare; it should have a meaningful and measurable impact on people’s health.
Prior to joining NSF, Wendy was a Health Scientist Administrator in the Office of the Director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And at NSF, she’s also worked in the Engineering directorate. These connections turn out to be exceptionally helpful, as many high-impact programs in the division involve interactions with NIH and with ENG, both of which have cultures that can sometimes be difficult to navigate without a sherpa like Wendy.
In addition to her fascinating academic pursuits and her four-star commitment to making IIS, CISE, and NSF the best they can be at supporting the research community, Wendy has been an avid horseback rider, a dedicated boating enthusiast, and she drives a very cool pickup truck. So, next time you get an IIS announcement from Wendy, you’ll have a slightly fuller picture of the person it’s coming from.
I also want to take a minute to (I hope!) clear up some possible misconceptions about the CloudBank program. I recently went to a workshop on AI and science and one of the attendees said, “Access to computing resources is so important to AI and ML research these days. I think it would be a good idea for NSF to use its clout to negotiate cloud resources on behalf of the community.” My reaction was: “That IS a good idea. And we’re already doing it!”
Specifically, if you are the PI of an active award from a CISE program (which includes IIS and several other divisions), you can request cloud credits for one or more cloud providers through CloudBank. Previously, we asked people to budget for these resources at proposal time. Now, however, CloudBank access is available as a grant supplement, meaning NSF can tack it on any time as long as the grant is active. For now, the money for these credits comes out of funds from CISE, meaning that there’s no direct impact on IIS’s budget. (Yay!)
I’ve prodded a few grad students that I’m working with to use CloudBank, and they have found it very useful (especially right before a publication deadline). I very much encourage you to give it a try if you are doing computationally heavy work. You can get details about the streamlined application process at: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22087/nsf22087.jsp .
Until next time!
-Michael