NSF CISE Newsletter: January 2022
01/21/2022
Fast Links and Funding Opportunities
Designing Accountable Software Systems (DASS)Deadline: January 28, 2022
Computer and Information Science and Engineering Minority-Serving Institutions Research Expansion Program (CISE-MSI Program)Deadline: February 11, 2022
Formal Methods in the Field (FMitF)Deadline: February 15, 2022
A Message from CISE Leadership
Dear CISE community,
First, I want to wish all of you a happy New Year. I remain hopeful that during 2022 we will see many breakthrough discoveries in our field that positively impact some of the most critical challenges our nation faces, even as we are still trying to manage the challenges that the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has brought upon us.
At CISE, we continue to work – some in person and some virtually – on accomplishing our priorities and setting new short- and long-term goals that support NSF’s mission of leading foundational research and discoveries to promote the progress of science in our country and beyond.
Last week, I participated in an event hosted by the White House to discuss open-source software security. Participating Federal agencies and industry leaders discussed the importance of improving the security of open-source software and increasing collaboration between private and public stakeholders to further our goal of a more secure cyberspace. In line with these efforts, CISE will continue to support programs that address cybersecurity and privacy such as the
Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace,
Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure, and
Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems programs.
This first iteration of our 2022 newsletters highlights a multi-disciplinary program led by our Division of Information and Intelligent Systems: the
Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science (SCH) program. The SCH program has been instrumental in advancing research, understanding system innovations in our healthcare system, and making significant contributions to the development of new technologies and approaches to health management.
But before I leave you to our newsletter, I would like to share with you a recent
report from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on the representation of women of color in tech fields and careers. The study reports that women of color earn less than 10 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in computing and less than 5 percent of doctorates. This trend affects the representation of women of color in the information technology workforce. At NSF, we continue to promote the participation of underserved groups, including women of color, through programs like
Broadening Participation in Computing,
CISE Broadening Participation in Computing Pilot,
Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions,
Computer and Information Science and Engineering Minority-Serving Institutions Research Expansion Program, Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science,
ADVANCE: Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions,
Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Excellence in Research, just to new a few.
We encourage you to continue to submit proposals to our programs and share this newsletter with your colleagues and peers.
Best,
Margaret Martonosi
NSF Assistant Director for CISE
Career Opportunities
CISE is looking to fill the following vacancies:
Program Director in the Computing and Communication Foundations Division. (Open until filled)
Interdisciplinary Program Director in the Computer and Network Systems Division – all clusters. (Open until filled)
News & Announcements
Funding Opportunity: NSF Convergence Accelerator 2022 Joint NSF/DOD Phases 1 and 2 for Track G: Securely Operating Through 5G InfrastructureImage Credit : U.S. National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator is accelerating research and discovery into practice by issuing a new funding opportunity for a new research track topic: Securely Operating Through 5G Infrastructure.
Academy of Finland funds research collaboration between Finland and USAImage Credit : Academy of Finland
The Academy of Finland has granted 3 million euros in funding for joint research projects between Finnish and US researchers. The funding was for seven projects involving eight parties from Finland and nine from the United States.
New public neuroimaging dataset provides deep sampling of individual human brainsImage Credit : University of Minnesota
Researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School have
published an extensive dataset that uses cutting-edge, high-field (7T) fMRI technology to probe how humans perceive, interpret and memorize naturalistic photographs. The Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) joins a growing body of big-data neuroimaging resources that are providing researchers with opportunities to develop deeper insights in cognitive and computational neuroscience.
Extreme weather changes predicted by unprecedented model simulationsImage Credit : Tim Schoon/University of Iowa
There is growing public awareness that climate change will impact society not only through changes in mean temperatures and rainfall over the 21st century, but also in the occurrence of more pronounced extreme events, and more generally in natural variability in the Earth system. Such changes could also have large impacts on vulnerable ecosystems in both terrestrial and marine habitats.
Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on Future Topics for the NSF Convergence AcceleratorImage Credit : U.S. National Science Foundation
The Convergence Accelerator builds upon NSF investments in fundamental research and discovery to accelerate solutions toward societal impact using a three-tiered approach: topic ideation, followed by convergence research phases 1 and 2. Topics aligned to a specific research focus are called “tracks” and funded teams constitute a cohort. The teams include multiple disciplines, expertise and cross-sector partnerships to stimulate innovative ideas and to develop long-lasting, sustainable solutions to support a variety of societal challenges.
Get more NSF NewsEvents
February 1 & 3, 2022
NSF Convergence Accelerator WebinarAugust 22-24, 2022
NSF Workshop on Software-hardware Co-Design for Quantum ComputingProgram Spotlight
Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science (SCH) 
Image Credit: U.S. National Science Foundation
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, medical, public health and healthcare delivery systems were experiencing significant stress, in part because of lack of experience with and access to innovative technology. Other businesses have seen increases in innovation because of adoption and investment in new analytics methods, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as new technologies.
To date, the biomedical and health communities have not been a part of this revolution, still embodied by systems that rely on individual expertise, limited data collection, and face-to-face interactions. The biomedical and health communities have been siloed from the technical communities. Both industry and government reviews note that bridging these siloes is a critical element in the improvement of the health system of our country. Thus, moving forward research in these areas requires the integration of computing, informatics, engineering, mathematics and statistics, behavioral and social science disciplines with the biomedical and public health communities. Recent developments in data science stemming from the significant advances in machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, pervasive computing and sensing, high performance and cloud computing, make such integration achievable.
The Smart Health and Biomedical Research in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Data Science (SCH) program is an interagency solicitation collaboration between NSF and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Smart Health supports innovative, high-risk/high-reward research with the promise of disruptive transformations in biomedical research, which can only be achieved by well-coordinated, convergent, inter-disciplinary approaches that draw from multiple domains of computer and information science, engineering, mathematical sciences and the biomedical, social, behavioral, and economic sciences.
The goal of this program is to fund research that address computational, algorithmic, data fusion and systemic level issues in biomedical data science research, as well as human perceptual, cognitive, or behavioral.
Wendy Nilsen, Acting Deputy Division Director for the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems within CISE noted that partnerships between the scientific, engineering, and biomedical teams all work to the main goal of the Smart Health program, that is, working as a team, can drive technical and biomedical innovation to improve the health of the country.
For more information, view the SCH solicitation
here. The next SCH deadline is November 10, 2022.
SciComm Corner
Personalized Models of Nutrition Intake from Continuous Glucose MonitorsImage Credit: National Institutes of Health
Despite the high prevalence of diabetes, managing the disease effectively is challenging. Continuous glucose monitoring systems have been used to measure glucose, which is a key indicator in diabetes. Because glucose is affected by the nutrients in the food people eat, it can change quickly and dramatically causing life threatening issues. Therefore, understanding what people with diabetes eat has been a key target of the field, but measuring food intake in the wild has been elusive. This project flips food measuring on its head by using changes in glucose to understand what has been eaten.
The interdisciplinary team studies food intake to understand individual glucose responses and extrapolates these data to create a model of what people are eating. Doing this work requires advances in Machine Learning (ML) that let the team parse this difficult and ever-changing data. By understanding what people are eating, the biomedical community can create more effective interventions. The project’s early work has shown the feasibility of the approach for understanding carbohydrates, fat and proteins. The research team has already published at multiple conferences and in journals and supported the contributions from multiple graduate students.
“The project is novel and potentially transformative. It depends on the crucial assumption that the glucose data can be used to accurately predict macronutrient composition, but it has high potential impact. Being a high-risk high-payoff project, it inverses metabolic models to predict macronutrients from the glucose signatures,” said NSF Program Director Wei Ding.
Disposable High Sensitivity Point of Care Immunosensors for Multiple Disease and Pathogen Detection Image Credit: Peter Allen, National Institutes of Health
Researchers at Arizona State University are investigating substances found in sweat and blood, such as protein, which can detect health and disease biomarkers. Researchers will measure changes in these proteins, to develop an inexpensive and disposable patch sensor that can be worn on the skin. Ideally, these sensors, which are now being developed for in-home COVID-19 assessment, can become as widely used as a thermometer found in most home medicine cabinets.
This project aims to create a miniature electronic sensing platform that can be combined with state-of-the-art biomarker proteomic detection technology to diagnose and monitor multiple diseases with medical laboratory level sensitivity. This proposal presents a new approach combining low-cost commercial display technology (found in your TV, computer monitor, or cell phone) with protein microarray printing technology to fabricate a low-cost, disposable sensor for more effective self-management of patient health care in the home or in other non-clinical settings.
“This project is a key for individual self-management and since each pixel can look for a different biomarker, each patch can provide feedback for a range of conditions, in many different environments,” noted NSF Program Director Sylvia Spengler.
A gamified mobile system for real-time mental health data modeling and personalized autism care across sociocultural settings Image Credit: Stanford University
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a broad-spectrum developmental disability, with a growing prevalence rate that has seen a four-fold increase over the last 5 years (1 in 44 children, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2021). Early intervention involving family and caregivers is very important to help reduce the burden of this disorder over their lifespan.
This project’s team has developed a mobile system-based prototype, Guess What, that uses a smartphone’s camera and fluidly engages with a child, facilitating prosocial learning and measuring the child’s developmental learning progress. The goal is to help the children be better at identifying social cues and behavior that will support them in forming new relationships. The team is constructing a novel Recurrent Neural Network models for identifying child’s emotions, head movements, hand movements, and eye gaze estimations. The project currently has active users in over 25 countries helping the team gather information from a diverse group of children of different races, cultures and ethnicities. These active users have so far played over 13,000 mobile games across 10 different game decks including faces/emojis, animal, sports, jobs, gestures and movement, objects, and code word decks. The medical experts on the team have also completed a clinical feasibility study on 72 children ages 3-8 and the results show a significant effect on social knowledge for children who played the game at least four times a week over one month period.
“The project provides an innovative, engaging, and affordable intervention platform, driven by sophisticated machine learning algorithms, that helps family members and caregivers to work together with these children. These are very young children and working with family members is both fun and rewarding in terms of handling their (children’s) issues arising from this broad-spectrum disorder.”, noted NSF Program Director Prabha (Balakrishnan) Prabhakaran.
Optimal Desensitization Protocol in Support of a Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) System Image Credit: National Institutes of Health
Today, more than 750,000 Americans suffer from end-stage renal disease. For most of these patients, treatment consists of biweekly dialysis, which severely affects their quality of life. Black Americans are 3 times as likely as white Americans to suffer from this disease. For the fortunate few, kidney transplants significantly improve quality of life, but the median wait time for a suitable donor kidney is more than 4 years. Additionally, many donated kidneys go unused because an acceptable match cannot be found.
In some cases, personalized treatment may be offered to desensitize the patient to the donor kidney by a selective antigen-removing regimen. This project seeks to expand the pool of acceptable donor kidneys by building data-driven decision models to improve transplantation outcomes, thereby increasing the number of successful transplants, decreasing transplantation wait times, and lowering overall system costs. The project involves a collaboration between researchers at George Mason University, the University of Maryland, and the Virginia Commonwealth University Health Hume-Lee Transplant Center—a designated kidney paired donation center.
“This work has the potential to significantly improve quality of life for patients suffering from end-stage kidney disease. Moreover, what the team will learn in designing algorithms for effective matching of kidneys with a desensitization regimen will provide insight into transplantation of other organs, such as the heart, lungs, and liver,” said NSF Program Director Georgia-Ann Klutke.
Faces of CISE: Elizabeth Mynatt, Ph.D.
Elizabeth Mynatt, Ph.D.
Dean
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Northeastern University
Photo Credit: Northeastern University
Elizabeth Mynatt, Ph.D., is the newly appointed Dean of Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. Her career spans 23 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), where she most recently served as Regents’ Professor in the College of Computing and executive director of the Institute of People and Technology. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. She currently serves as member of the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and she chaired the recent update to the
National Academies "Tire Tracks" report. Mynatt is also a member of the NSF CISE Advisory Committee. She is the past Chair of the Computing Community Consortium — an NSF-sponsored effort to engage the computing research community in envisioning more audacious research challenges.
Mynatt is an internationally recognized expert in the areas of ubiquitous computing, personal health informatics, and assistive technologies. She has worked with several partners, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Emory Brain Health Center, Parkview Health, and the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University to understand the design and adoption of socio-technical computing systems that enable people to better support their health and wellness needs.
NSF support has been critical to Mynatt achieving her research ambitions and enabling her to evolve her research agenda. She received an NSF CAREER award that supported her research in fostering informal collaboration through Bayesian models of availability and likelihood of future interactions. A critical juncture in her career came with the NSF ITR funding of the Aware Home, launching decades of research into context-aware computing for home health and wellness needs. New NSF programs in Smart Health and Well-Being and Smart and Connected Health provided new avenues to explore the potential of mobile and wearable technologies and services. Mynatt’s research resulted in new approaches to foster sensemaking for newly diagnosed diabetics, fitness and healthy identities for adolescents, and personalized and adaptive engagement for breast cancer patients. This last project was jointly supported by the National Cancer Institute and was featured in a report to President Barack Obama by the President’s Cancer Panel.
Mynatt is particularly excited to bring together these threads of her research in the newly funded NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI CARING). This institute “will develop a discipline focused on personalized, longitudinal, collaborative AI, enabling the development of AI systems that learn personalized models of user behavior, understand how people’s behavior changes over time, and integrate that knowledge to support people and AIs working together.” Akin to her decades of past research, Mynatt will help guide the innovation of new intelligent, interactive systems that are deeply rooted in health and wellness needs and that foster useable and useful human-centered experiences.
CISE Units
Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS)CNS invents new computing and networking technologies, while ensuring their security and privacy, and finds new ways to make use of current technologies.
Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF)CCF advances computing and communication theory, algorithms for computer and computational sciences and architecture and the design of computers and software.
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS)IIS studies the interrelated roles of people, computers and information to increase the ability to understand data, as well as mimic the hallmarks of intelligence in computational systems.
Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC)OAC supports and coordinates the development, acquisition and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to the advancement and transformation of Science and engineering.
