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Engineering Virtual Organization Grants

Status: Archived

Archived funding opportunity

This document has been archived.

Important information about NSF’s implementation of the revised 2 CFR

NSF Financial Assistance awards (grants and cooperative agreements) made on or after October 1, 2024, will be subject to the applicable set of award conditions, dated October 1, 2024, available on the NSF website. These terms and conditions are consistent with the revised guidance specified in the OMB Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance published in the Federal Register on April 22, 2024.

Important information for proposers

All proposals must be submitted in accordance with the requirements specified in this funding opportunity and in the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) that is in effect for the relevant due date to which the proposal is being submitted. It is the responsibility of the proposer to ensure that the proposal meets these requirements. Submitting a proposal prior to a specified deadline does not negate this requirement.

Synopsis

The primary purpose of this solicitation is to promote the development of Virtual Organizations (VO's) for the engineering community (EVOs).  A VO is created by a group of individuals whose members and resources may be dispersed globally, yet who function as a coherent unit through the use of cyberinfrastructure (CI).  EVOs will extend beyond small collaborations and individual departments or institutions to encompass wide-ranging, geographically dispersed activities and groups. This approach has the potential to revolutionize the conduct of science and engineering research, education, and innovation. These systems provide shared access to centralized or distributed resources, such as community-specific sets of tools, applications, data, and sensors, and experimental operations, often in real time. 

With the access to enabling tools and services, self-organizing communities can create VOs to facilitate scientific workflows; collaborate on experiments; share information and knowledge; remotely operate instrumentation; run numerical simulations using shared computing resources; dynamically acquire, archive, e-publish, access, mine, analyze, and visualize data; develop new computational models; and deliver unique learning, workforce-development, and innovation tools. Most importantly, each VO design can originate within a community and be explicitly tailored to meet the needs of that specific community.  At the same time, to exploit the full power of cyberinfrastructure for a VO's needs, research domain experts need to collaborate with CI professionals who have expertise in algorithm development, systems operations, and application development. 

This program solicitation requests proposals for two-year seed awards to establish EVOs.  Proposals must address the EVO organizing principle, structure, shared community resources, and research and learning goals; a vision for organizing the community, including international partners; a vision for preparing the CI components needed to enable those goals; a plan to obtain and document user requirements formally; and a project management plan for developing both a prototype implementation and a conceptual design of a full implementation. These items will be used as criteria for evaluation along with the standard NSF criteria of Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts.  Within the award size constraints, the prototype implementation should provide proof of concept with a limited number of its potential CI features.  Successful proposals should expect to demonstrate the benefits of a fully functional EVO and how it will catalyze both large and small connections, circumventing the global limitations of geography and time zones.

Program contacts

Phillip Westmoreland
Coordinator; Program Director, ENG/CBET
pwestmor@nsf.gov (703) 292-8371
Eduardo Misawa
Coordinator; Program Director, ENG/CMMI
emisawa@nsf.gov (703) 292-5353
Maria Burka
Program Director, ENG/CBET
mburka@nsf.gov (703) 292-7030
Bruce Hamilton
Program Director, ENG/CBET
bhamilto@nsf.gov (703) 292-7066 ENG/CBET
Deborah Jackson
Program Director, ENG/EEC
djackson@nsf.gov (703) 292-7499
Glenn Larsen
Program Director, ENG/IIP
glarsen@nsf.gov (703) 292-4607
Scott Midkiff
Program Director, ENG/ECCS
smidkiff@nsf.gov (703) 292-8339
Stephen Nash
Program Director, ENG/CMMI
snash@nsf.gov (703) 292-7902
Joy Pauschke
Program Director, ENG/CMMI
jpauschk@nsf.gov (703) 292-7024
Paul Werbos
Program Director, ENG/ECCS
pwerbos@nsf.gov (703) 292-8339
Jeanne Hudson
Program Director, OISE
jhudson@nsf.gov (703) 292-7252

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