Addressing Systems Challenges through Engineering Teams (ASCENT)

The Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems Division (ECCS) supports enabling and transformative engineering research at the nano, micro, and macro scales that fuels progress in engineering system applications with high societal impact. This includes fundamental engineering research underlying advanced devices and components and their seamless penetration in communications, sensing, power, controls, networking, or cyber systems. The research is envisioned to be empowered by cutting-edge computation, synthesis, evaluation, and analysis technologies and is to result in significant impact for a variety of application domains in healthcare, homeland security, disaster mitigation, telecommunications, energy, environment, transportation, manufacturing, and other systems-related areas. ECCS also supports new and emerging research areas encompassing 6G and Beyond Spectrum and Wireless Technologies, Quantum Information Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), High-Performance Computing, and Big Data.

ECCS, through its ASCENT program, offers its engineering community the opportunity to address research issues and answer engineering challenges associated with complex systems and networks that are not achievable by a single principal investigator or by short-term projects and can only be achieved by interdisciplinary research teams. ECCS envisions a connected portfolio of transformative and integrative projects that create synergistic links by investigators across its three ECCS clusters: Communications, Circuits, and Sensing-Systems (CCSS), Electronics, Photonics and Magnetic Devices (EPMD), and Energy, Power, Control, and Networks (EPCN), yielding novel ways of addressing challenges of engineering systems and networks. ECCS seeks proposals that are bold and ground-breaking, transcend the perspectives and approaches typical of disciplinary research efforts, and lead to disruptive technologies and methods or enable significant improvement in quality of life.

• ASCENT supports fundamental research projects involving at least three collaborating PIs and co-PIs, up to four years in duration, with a total budget between $1 million and $1.5 million.
• ASCENT proposals must highlight the engineering leadership focus of the proposal within the scope of ECCS programs.
• ASCENT proposals must articulate a fundamental research problem with compelling intellectual challenge and significant societal impact. The topic at the heart of the proposal must involve research areas of at least two of the three ECCS clusters (CCSS, EPMD, EPCN). Research proposals spanning three clusters are highly encouraged.
• ASCENT proposals must demonstrate the need for a concerted research effort by an integrated and interdisciplinary team, and strongly justify the interdisciplinary nature of the proposed work. They should include a timeline for research activities, with a strong justification of the explicit mechanisms for frequent communication between team members and effective assessment to achieve proposed goals.

Assuming sufficient funding is provided in the NSF budget, it is anticipated that the ASCENT competition will continue with research themes and priorities subject to changing in the subsequent years.