Information and Intelligent Systems:

NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems is seeking proposals that describe ambitious research and/or education projects that will extend the state-of-the-art in:

• Collaborative Systems: systems that enable collaboration between a person and either machines or other people in acquiring, representing, organizing, archiving, protecting, accessing and communicating information, and
• Robust Intelligence: systems with robust and flexible intelligence, capable of perceiving, reasoning, learning, and interacting with their environment.

Additionally, the Division is seeking research and/or education proposals that use or extend Collaborative Systems and Robust Intelligence theories or methods and apply them in three application areas:

• Universal Access: to increase access to information and systems by users, such as the vision-impaired or the elderly, whose needs are often not met in traditional systems.
• Digital Government: to improve access to information and services provided by governmental entities; as well as the workings of governments.
• Digital Libraries and Archives: to represent, store and access information from curated digital libraries and archives.

Single or multidisciplinary research and/or education projects will be supported that explore innovative ideas, theories and experiments that move beyond incremental advances to enable fundamentally different intelligent or collaborative systems approaches or paradigms. The development of curricular materials that have the potential to greatly improve higher education in Collaborative Systems and Robust Intelligence and their applications will also be supported. Curriculum development projects may be submitted as stand-alone proposals or may be included as part of broader research and education proposals under the categories above.