News Archive

From SIResearchInnovationOffice

Revision as of 08:21, 22 October 2008

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

GOOGLE EARTH CONFERENCE at UM OCTOBER 22-23, 2008

The purpose of this meeting is to explore scientific investigations that are enabled by global-scale reach and interactivity provided by Google Earth. These discussions will occur during a two-day meeting organized in collaboration between Google and the University of Michigan. Faculty, students, and members of the research community from all over the country will be attending. The meeting will be organized in working-groups that combine scientists and members of the Google community in an effort to explore new applications and areas for development.

For more information please visit the Conference Website

• Registration Deadline: October 15

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

CALL for PROPOSALS for GROCS 2009

In 250 words or less, tell us how you would collaborate with other students to transform learning. GROCS supports student-initiated team projects that explore new ways to create knowledge and rich social benefits through the use of emerging technologies. Teams must be interdisciplinary, the activity must include an academic component, and collaboration must be a significant and integral part of the project, either in its progress or its outcome.

Submit Project Abstracts by October 1, 2008 on the GROCS Website.

Selected Projects Will Receive:

• $2,500 cash grant per student team member (up to 4 per each team). $2,000 will be provided in January; the balance upon completion of the Wrap and Community Participation Requirement (see below).
• $1,000 per advisor (1), to be distributed in Winter Semester.
• Equipped workspace in a collaborative environment at the Duderstadt Center.
• Limited funding for additional project-specific equipment to be retained by the University.

Please read the Selection Criteria, Project Requirements and other important details in the full text of the CFP.

For more information: GROCS.info@umich.edu.

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2008

REPORT on "Survey of Investigator's Experinces in Human Research"

This unique survey of UM investigators was developed and implemented by the UM Institute for Social Research (ISR) in partnership with OHRCR. The overall goal of the survey is to obtain information from UM investigators to improve the UM Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).

Download a copy of the Survey

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2008

AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT

• The SI Faculty went 3 for 3 in their applications to the IMLS program submitted to the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians Program!

PI: Elizabeth Yakel

Project Title: "Engaging Communities to Foster Internships for Preservation and Digital Curation"

PI: Paul Conway serving as the UM lead with University of Maryland

Project Title: "Digital Humanities Model Internship Program"

PI: Beth Yakel serving as the UM lead with UCLA

Project Title: "Building the Future of Archival Education and Research"

For more information and project descriptions please visit the IMLS News & Events website

• HUMANITIES GROUPS SUPPORT FY09 NEH FUNDS, RAISE CONCERNS ABOUT PRESERVATION CUTS

The Association of American Universities, June 20, 2008

Several organizations with an interest in the humanities, including AAU and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, wrote to the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior on June 19 to urge the panel to approve at least the level of funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recommended by the panel’s House counterpart. The House subcommittee has proposed increasing FY09 funding for the NEH to $160 million. This represents a $15.3 million increase over FY08 funding (and $15 million more than the President’s request). At the same time, the groups asked the Senate panel to reverse cuts approved by the House subcommittee in the preservation and access programs at NEH.

Copy of the letter: http://www.aau.edu/budget/Ltr_JointAssns_NEH09_6-19-08.pdf

• U.S. EXPERTS BEMOAN NATION'S LOSS OF STATURE IN THE WORLD OF SCIENCE

By Keith B. Richburg, The Washington Post, May 29, 2008

Some of the nation's leading scientists, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top science adviser, today sharply criticized the diminished role of science in the United States and the shortage of federal funding for research, even as science becomes increasingly important to combating problems such as climate change and the global food shortage. Speaking at a science summit that opens this week's first World Science Festival, the expert panel of scientists, and audience members, agreed that the United States is losing stature because of a perceived high-level disdain for science. Complete article at: [1]

Click here for more information about the first World Science Festival

• ADVICE FROM THE TOP: UNIVERSITY RESEARCH HELPS USA COMPETE

By Del Jones, USA Today, May 19, 2008

The Bayh-Dole Act was enacted 27 years ago, but the ramifications persist to this day. The act lets universities patent and commercialize inventions that come from federally funded research. It has gradually turned universities into incubators for breakthroughs in technology and medicine. Stanford owns the patent on Google's Internet search technology, and last year, the university earned $48 million from 428 technologies licensed to companies. Texas Instruments was early to recognize the power of university research. The company has partnerships with Rice, Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois, among others, and with universities in India and China. CEO Rich Templeton, 49, spoke with USA TODAY management reporter Del Jones about the R&D coming from colleges. Complete article at: [2]

• ADVICE FROM THE TOP: UNIVERSITY RESEARCH HELPS USA COMPETE

By Del Jones, USA Today, May 19, 2008

The Bayh-Dole Act was enacted 27 years ago, but the ramifications persist to this day. The act lets universities patent and commercialize inventions that come from federally funded research. It has gradually turned universities into incubators for breakthroughs in technology and medicine. Stanford owns the patent on Google's Internet search technology, and last year, the university earned $48 million from 428 technologies licensed to companies. Texas Instruments was early to recognize the power of university research. The company has partnerships with Rice, Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois, among others, and with universities in India and China. CEO Rich Templeton, 49, spoke with USA TODAY management reporter Del Jones about the R&D coming from colleges. Complete article at: [3]

Adamic and Ackerman Research in ACM TechNews

Research by SI Faculty Lada Adamic and Mark Ackerman on Yahoo! Answers is highlighted in the April 28, 2008 addition of ACM TechNews. For a link to the copy of the entire article go to the TechNews section of the ACM website.

Call for Papers: Social Science Computer Review on e-Social Science:

Since the beginning of the new millennium, a world-wide effort has been underway to develop and deploy a new generation of advanced infrastructure which, it is argued, is essential to enable new advances in scientific research. This infrastructure, known as ‘the Grid’ or increasingly commonly as ‘e-Infrastructure’ (cyberinfrastructure in the US), comprises networked, interoperable, scalable computational tools and services that make it possible to locate, access, share, aggregate and manipulate digitised data seamlessly on a hitherto unrealisable scale.

The motivation for this special issue of the Social Science Computer Review is to document the state-of-the-art in e-Social Science. This embraces two distinct strands of work: one examines the impact of e-infrastructure on the social science research community’s capacity to meet its research challenges and the other traces the contribution that e-Social Science is making to solving the very real and significant obstacles to the wide adoption of e-infrastructure across all the sciences.

Our aim in this special issue is to improve mutual awareness, harmonize understanding, and instigate coordinated activities to accelerate research, development, and deployment of e-infrastructure to support the social science research community.

To this end, we invite contributions from members of the social science and e-infrastructure research communities with experience of – or interests in – exploring, developing, and applying new methods, practices, and tools that are facilitated by e-infrastructure in order to further social science research, and in studying the wider development of e-infrastructure-enabled research and its component technologies.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• Case studies of e-Social Science research methods and applications

• Accessing new sources and forms of social data through e-Social Science

• Infrastructure and tools for e-Social Science

• Middleware for data collection, sharing and integration

• Standards for metadata, ontologies, annotation, curation, etc.

• Usability issues in the design of research tools and middleware

• Case studies of (e-)Research and (e-)Social Science research practices

• The benefits and challenges of large scale collaborative research

• Issues about the wider adoption and sustainability of e-Infrastructure

• Evolution of the e-Infrastructure roadmap, from Grids to web 2.0

• Interdisciplinary research in e-Social Science

• International collaborations in e-Social Science

• Socio-technical issues in the development of e-Research and e-infrastructure

• Ethical issues and challenges in the collection, integration, sharing and analysis of social and personal data

Submission requirements and instructions

Submissions should be between 6000-8000 words in length.

All submissions will be subject to independent review by the members of the special issue editorial panel and a final decision will be made by the special issue editors.

Deadlines and submission instructions

Drafts of full papers are due on July 1st, 2008. They should be emailed to Rob Procter (rob.procter@manchester.ac.uk) to whom any queries should also be sent.

Increase in Graduate Research Fellowship Program in FY09: According to a report in the 3/14 issue of Science

[4], NSF has requested a significant increase in funding for the Graduate Research Fellowship program in the FY 09 budget. This would be a rise from $88 M to $110 M, or approximately 700 new awards (which should raise the current 10% success rate for applicants). This increase is attributed to Richard Freeman’s data showing that the GRFs play a disproportionate role in encouraging undergraduates to pursue scientific careers. Specifically, in one survey of 1800 Harvard undergrads, 40% said they would opt for graduate school if given a “national fellowship,” in contrast to the 18% who would otherwise pursue graduate education. Freeman has also studied the signaling role of GRFs, where the awards per number of undergrad science and engineering degrees has dropped from a high of 5.4 awards per 1000 degrees at the program’s inception in the early 50s – to 2.2 awards per 1000 degrees recently. That is, as the availability of awards has gone down, students have made other choices (Freeman also points out that the value of the awards declined to around $15 K in the 1990s, but has recently been boosted to a more competitive level of $30 K). Here’s a link to Freeman’s most comprehensive analysis: [5] Of course, Congress has to improve this increase. However, it is the single biggest increase in NSF’s education budget – and the leadership on the House oversight committee for NSF hasn’t rejected the increase.

For information regarding this years winners go to [Awardee List]

For program information please go to [the NSF Graduate Fellows website]

News from Washington

• HOUSE SUPPLEMENTAL BILL WELCOMED FOR R&D FUNDING BOOST

By Andrew Noyes, CongressDailyPM, June 23, 2008

Congressional science champions are giving cautious praise to the House-passed war supplemental bill for its inclusion of extra funding for key federal science and research programs. The compromise includes $400 million for federal research programs. This funding is provided on an emergency basis -- therefore it is considered a one-time appropriation that does not increase the spending baseline for future years. The measure would provide $150 million for the National Institutes of Health; $62.5 million for the Energy Department's Science Office; $62.5 million for the National Science Foundation ($22.5 million for NSF Research and Related Activities and $40 million for NSF Education and Human Resources); and $62.5 million for NASA. A Senate vote on the House version is possible this week, and Bush has indicated that he will probably sign it.

Complete article at: http://www.nationaljournal.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/congressdaily/cdp_20080623_4239.php

UPDATE: June 27, 2008 - Following House passage of the war supplemental, last night the Senate voted 92 to 6 in support of the legislation. The bill, which includes a total of $400 million for the NIH, the NSF, NASA and DOE’s Office of Science and environmental management for this fiscal year, moves on to the White House to be signed into law.

• APPROPRIATIONS FOR FY09

Appropriators have begun writing their FY09 bills. While the news is good for research, it is just the start of a long process -- much can change between now and when final FY09 funding levels are agreed to. Below are the recommendations from the House and Senate Subcommittees.

• House Labor, Health and Human Services (a draft Senate bill is expected on June 24) - $30.4 billion for the NIH ($1.2 billion over FY08)
• House Energy and Water (a date for consideration of a Senate bill is TBA) - Approximately $4.86 billion for the DOE Office of Science ($844 million over FY08)
• House Commerce, Justice and Science - $6.85 billion for the NSF ($789.1 million over FY08) & $17.8 billion for NASA (approximately $700 million over FY08)
• Senate Commerce, Justice, Science - $6.9 billion for the NSF & $17.8 billion for NASA