NSF FY99 Budget

COMPUTER AND INFORMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING $331,140,000

The FY 1999 Budget Request for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Activity is $331.14 million, an increase of $46.97 million, or 16.5 percent, over the FY 1998 Current Plan of $284.17 million.

(Millions of Dollars)

Information technology plays an increasingly important role in nearly every part of our lives, affecting work, commerce, science and engineering research, and education. Over the past decade, information technology has evolved explosively as computers have become more powerful and cost-effective, as networks have become more pervasive and higher performing, and as software has become easier to use and more capable of serving many purposes. The federal investment in research has played, and continues to play, a key role in developing early U.S. leadership in underlying computing, communications and information technologies and in applying these technologies to many areas of critical national importance. Through its research, education, and infrastructure programs, the CISE Activity has been a major contributor in the realization of this success. CISE goals are to:

Enable the U.S. to uphold a position of world leadership in computing, communications, and information science and engineering.
Promote understanding of the principles and uses of advanced computing, communications, and information systems in service to science and engineering, education, and society.
Contribute to universal, transparent, and affordable participation in an information-based society.

This Activity supports investigator-initiated research in all areas of computer and information science and engineering, helps develop and maintain a cutting-edge national computing and information infrastructure for research and education generally, and contributes to the education and training of the next generation of computer scientists and engineers. CISE provides over 50 percent of the total federal support for fundamental research in computer science at colleges and universities.

CISE participates in the three NSF-wide efforts of Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence, Life and Earth’s Environment, and Educating for the Future.

Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI)

In FY 1999, CISE will include an increase of $14.12 million for KDI. Plans include:

Knowledge Networking - An increase of $5.0 million will support:

Advancing the next generation of interconnected communication networks (the Next Generation Internet - NGI), information, associated databases, and collaborative technologies to enable new ways of creating, sharing, finding and using knowledge ($2.0 million); and
Digital Libraries Phase 2, a joint NSF, DARPA, NASA, National Library of Medicine, and Library of Congress collaboration, which will expand into new types of content and collections, applications of digital libraries, and their societal and economic contexts ($3.0 million).

Learning and Intelligent Systems - An increase of $3.12 million will support research on developing theories and models related to learning and learning-based intelligent systems, and the use of technology in education.
New Challenges in Computation - An increase of $6.0 million will focus on support for advanced networking (NGI) applications including:

Control of networked resources in real-time, including "on-the-fly" data analysis to guide experiments that require both high speed computation and immediate response;
Development of metacomputing applications utilizing unique distributed computing resources requiring high performance network access for data movement; and
Data intensive computing for multi-scale, time-limited applications such as modeling membrane channels.

Life and Earth’s Environment (LEE)

In FY 1999, CISE will include an increase of $2.50 million for LEE. Plans include support for fundamental work to enable both integrated research challenges and future environmental observatories. Research emphases include:

Data analysis, manipulation, transmission, and creation during simulations; and tools for remote observation and experimentation in extreme environments; and
Data storage and retrieval management in massive databases, data-mining and query optimization, and scientific databases of data types not currently available.

Educating for the Future (EFF)

EFF includes a range of programs supporting innovative approaches to meeting the challenge of educating students for the 21^st Century. In FY 1999, CISE will include an increase of $2.50 million for EFF. Major emphases include:

Integration of Research and Education:

Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU): An increase of $150,000 will enhance support for REU. This program provides opportunities for undergraduate students to experience hands-on participation in NSF research projects.
Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT): CISE will continue to support this program (+$250,000), which provides support for training graduate students in a multidisciplinary research setting.
Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER): An increase of $1.0 million will allow CISE to support additional awards for young investigators through the CAREER program within the context of their overall career development and combining the integrated support of research and education.

Learning Technologies:

In FY 1999, CISE will participate in a Foundation-wide initiative on Research on Education and Training Technologies (+$1.0 million). This initiative, a partnership with the Department of Education, will include support for efforts such as basic research on educationally relevant technologies; research aimed at developing educational software and technology-enabled pedagogy; and studies to determine the most effective educational approaches and practices.

Key Program Functions

CISE pursues the Foundation’s goals through the following key program functions:
(Millions of Dollars)

¹Includes only costs charged to the R&RA Appropriation. In FY 1999, CISE will increase research project support to $199.29 million from $167.81 million in FY 1998, with emphasis placed on activities such as networking, communications, universal access, human centered systems, security and reliability, and on integrating research and education. In facilities support, two complementary changes will strengthen infrastructure resources for sustaining U.S. world leadership in science and engineering. First, the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) will focus on rapidly implementing planned partner activities. Second, a total of $25 million will be directed into the coordinated federal interagency effort to accelerate the Next Generation Internet (NGI), including: development of the advanced networking interconnectivity ($11.0 million), fundamental research on advanced networking ($6.0 million), research applications of advanced networking to cutting-edge science and engineering challenges ($6.0 million), and knowledge networking ($2.0 million). Education and Training increases to a total of $6.27 million, with an emphasis on efforts to increase the integration of research and education.

In FY 1999, CISE will implement efforts to address Foundation-wide concerns about grant sizes by increasing the average size and duration of the awards and providing more support for researchers, with particular attention to new investigators. These efforts will also contribute to increasing the efficiency of the Foundation's merit review process and achieve greater cost-effectiveness for both NSF and the university community.

Research Project Support
(Millions of Dollars)

More than half of CISE funding is directed toward investigator-initiated, fundamental research projects in computer and information science and engineering. Carried out primarily at colleges and universities, this encompasses disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborative projects and frequently contributes to advancing research in other science and engineering areas. Examples include approaches to large scale fundamental scientific and engineering problems that are computationally- and information-intensive, Digital Libraries, and Advanced Networking Challenges. CISE makes more than 1,500 awards a year with an average duration of 2.6 years and an average annualized funding level of about $96,000. Projects involve senior scientists, graduate students, postdoctoral investigators and undergraduates. To ensure maximal productivity, FY 1999 plans include increasing the average annualized award size for research projects where appropriate.

In FY 1999, research funded through CISE will focus on several broad thematic areas that are planned to increase $16.32 million:

Human-centered systems research to improve interactions among people, computing systems, and information resources. Research issues are data capture and storage; information management and access; knowledge representation; and intelligent human and computer interaction. This fundamental research draws on the cognitive sciences, biological and behavioral sciences, mathematics and engineering, and advances universal access, digital libraries, and knowledge networking and its role in NGI.
Computing systems research encompassing core fundamental research such as theory, hardware, software, algorithms, and systems and component architectures. This explores and contributes to new possibilities for highly distributed and collaborative computation and communication environments. Research attention will be paid to reliability, security, network quality of service; fundamental problems in networking and communications; and radically new paradigms for computing.

Convergence of computing and communications. The rapid advances in digital networking technology have created opportunities for all disciplines to explore new ways of conducting research and education, and studying otherwise intractable problems. To better define the possibilities as they relate to the NGI, support will be provided, for example, for applications research requiring high performance networking to support geographically distributed heterogeneous computing, real-time remote control of experiments, generation of and access to local and remote distributed data, computations involving access to massive amounts of data, and novel educational applications.

Support will continue for the Major Research Instrumentation program in FY 1999.

In FY 1999, CISE will participate in a Foundation-wide initiative on Research on K-12 Education and Training Technologies. This initiative, a partnership with the Department of Education, will include support for efforts such as basic research on educationally relevant technologies; research aimed at developing educational software and technology-enabled pedagogy; and studies to determine the most effective educational approaches and practices.

Within Research Project Support, CISE also provides funds for four Science and Technology Centers that work on broad, interdisciplinary research problems requiring extensive coordinated efforts. (Millions of Dollars)

The CISE Science and Technology Centers are:

The Center for Research in Parallel Computation (CRPC) (Rice University, California Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, University of Tennessee, Argonne National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory);
The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) (Rutgers University, Princeton University, Bellcore, Bell Laboratories, and ATT Research);
The Center for Computer Graphics and Scientific Visualization (CGSV) (University of Utah, Cornell University, Brown University, California Institute of Technology, and University of North Carolina); and
The Center for Cognitive Science (University of Pennsylvania), which is jointly supported with the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Activity.

These centers share several important characteristics: a unifying cross-disciplinary intellectual focus; important education and outreach activities; an emphasis on knowledge-transfer, including linkages with private sector organizations; and partnerships involving extensive research coordination. Two of these centers, CRPC and CGSV, are making important contributions to the development and use of collaboration technologies which permit geographically distributed researchers to interact in a "virtual" center. The Cognitive Science Center conducts studies fundamental to understanding learning and intelligent systems. Funding for CRPC and DIMACS will be reduced as part of the planned phase-down of their activities.

Research Facilities
(Millions of Dollars)

Two facilities programs, Advanced Computational Infrastructure (ACI) and Advanced Networking Infrastructure (ANI), provide state-of-the-art computing and communications essential for advanced work in all fields of science and engineering. The former develops and provides the most advanced, leading-edge computing capabilities; the latter, the major high-performance network and information-communications infrastructure for the U.S. scientific and engineering community. These facilities complement each other in enabling and developing experimentation with high performance computational and communications tools, providing training and education in the use of cutting-edge scientific computing and information technologies, and facilitating geographically-separated and cross-sector collaboration in research and education.

Support for Advanced Computational Infrastructure will total $73.96 million in FY 1999, an increase from $69.96 million in FY 1998. With the completion of the phase-down of the NSF Supercomputer Centers program, the new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program is in operation. Continuity in ongoing efforts has been achieved, with PACI focusing in FY 1999 on taking advantage of newly emerging opportunities in high performance computing and communications, as well as involvement in information intensive activities. As planned, funding for partner sites will increase in FY 1999 for enabling technologies, application technologies, and education, outreach and training to broaden and accelerate the capability of the research community to utilize the advanced computational capabilities provided by PACI.
Support for ANI, which includes the facilities portion of funding for the interagency Next Generation Internet ($11.0 million), will total $48.74 million in FY 1999, an increase from $37.74 million in FY 1998. NSF’s networking infrastructure activities in FY 1999 will focus on advanced, high performance network connectivity between research institutions, and will continue to create the environment essential for next generation high-performance networking applications, technologies, and services. The ANI program’s largest single activity is the very high performance Backbone Network System (vBNS), which is essential to the success of PACI, and is the core network providing interconnectivity for Internet 2 and for backbone interconnectivity for NGI. In FY 1999, the vBNS will selectively upgrade connections from OC-12 (622 megabits per second) to OC-48 (2.4 gigabits per second), upgrade interconnections to support Quality of Service (QoS) and integrated service, and continue support for EPSCoR connections.

This program participates in the interagency Next Generation Internet activity to complement the university-led Internet 2 effort supported through the private sector and participating universities. Within the Next Generation Internet initiative, ANI focuses on advanced, high performance network connectivity between research institutions and contributes to basic infrastructure for high-end research applications.
Education and Training (Millions of Dollars)

CISE incorporates programs for education and training to ensure the supply of scientists and engineers in all computer- and information-related research activities, to increase the participation of underrepresented groups, to experiment with innovative applications of computer, communications and information technology, and to provide training in state-of-the-art computing and communications.

Responding to the need for more people with advanced skills in all areas of computer and information science and engineering, CISE will continue to promote incorporating up-to-date research findings into the undergraduate curriculum. The goals are two-fold: to improve undergraduate education in technical areas to better prepare students for careers in industry, research, or teaching; and to improve educational processes and tools for all students so they are prepared to participate effectively in the affairs of a technology-intensive society. In FY 1999, CISE continues to participate in the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program, an NSF-wide program for graduate traineeships emphasizing multidisciplinary training.

Administration and Management

The administration and management key program function includes the cost of Intergovernmental Personnel Act appointments and contractors performing administrative functions.