Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Context: In my role as division director of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) at NSF, I’m sending out a short message to the IIS mailing list on the Second Tuesday Every Month (STEM). This is the installment for January 2025, perfectly on time if you ignore that it’s the THIRD Tuesday and that I missed December 2024 entirely.
Happy new year!
This month’s message is motivated by the fact that we are looking for a new Division Director. You might have seen Wendy’s announcement that I’m rotating back to my home institution in July to serve as Brown University’s first ever “Associate Provost for AI”. I’m really excited about it, even though I was hoping to spend one more year at NSF. (IPA arrangements last from one to four years and I will complete my third year in July.) One of the amazing things about this transition for me is how well my current work at NSF prepared me to help steer my university’s efforts around AI research, teaching, operations, policy, and communications. Working at the NSF is fulfilling from the perspective of putting in effort to support the amazing research my professional colleagues (all of you!) are doing nationwide. But it’s also an incredible way to learn about managing the research enterprise, something we’re all engaged in.
I’m hoping some of you reading this will throw your hat in the ring this time or maybe in the future. NSF Division Directors (or DDs) are senior people in the field. They have some management experience (often having served as an academic department chair or the leader of a large center) and are ready to learn a lot of new things quickly. This last criterion took me a bit by surprise. I knew I’d be getting a crash course in the US government and that I’d be overseeing support for a broad range of topics, but I didn’t realize HOW broad---IIS supports about 500 projects each year in artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, robotics, data management, assistive technologies, computer graphics, educational technologies, computational neuroscience, virtual reality, computationally enabled science, and many other areas. The DD doesn’t have to be an expert in all of these, but has to understand the topics enough to appreciate why they are important and how they fit together. If your exposure to IIS has been focused on one of two domains, take a look at our website (https://new.nsf.gov/cise/iis) to see some of the other exciting computing and interdisciplinary topics we cover. It’s eye-(I-S)-opening. (Sorry about that.)
If you are interested in more information, please reach out to me or Wendy (IIS’s deputy division director) and we can fill you in. It matters a lot to me personally (and Wendy perhaps more so!) that we line up someone terrific to take the reins. You get to work with a professional and passionate group of people for a purpose we all believe in. Hard to ask for more than that!
If the DD role isn’t a fit for you, we’re also looking for another program officer. We have an opening for an IPA (aka "rotator") position for up to 4 years in the Information Integration and Informatics (often shortened to "triple I") cluster. III supports all sorts of interesting work that is very much at the cutting edge of the big shifts associated with the broad impacts that CS/IT/AI can have in the world. From the relevant Dear Colleague Letter, https://new.nsf.gov/careers/openings/cise/iis/iis-2024-115577 :
We are especially interested in candidates with expertise in the III core areas; that is, researchers engaged in innovative science on informatics and computational methods for the full data lifecycle, from collection through archiving and knowledge discovery. Researchers with expertise in fairness, transparency and accountability in machine learning, artificial intelligence and/or informatics are especially encouraged.
I hope you can join us!
-Michael