Funding the Future

Academic IT Research Hints at Emerging Technologies with Commercial Potential

Cutting-edge IT research groups recently got a big financial boost when the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced $156 million in grants awarded to 309 computer science projects at leading U.S. academic institutions. The money is distributed through the NSF's Information Technology Research (ITR) program, started in 2000, which supports innovative uses of IT in science and engineering.

"Our objective is to support the development of software and IT services that will help scientists and engineers make the kind of discoveries that will eventually be applied by industry," said NSF director Rita Colwell.

The NSF reviewed more than 2,000 proposals and distributed the lion's share of funding to eight large projects. An additional 113 medium and 188 small projects also received grants for periods ranging from three to five years. The largest grant, for $13,750,000, went to the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is developing architecture for scaling IT to massive levels and embedding systems in objects using nanotechnology.

A grant for $13,650,000 went to a consortium of 15 U.S. universities and four national laboratories that will work with other nations on the International Virtual Data Grid Laboratory (iVDGL), envisioned as a global distributed computing grid with the computational power to handle petabytes of data from scientific disciplines such as physics, astronomy, biology, and engineering.

Another funded project with commercial IT potential is the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), a University of California, Berkeley (UCB)-led research consortium of four UC campuses. CITRIS received more than $7 million from the NSF to continue its efforts in developing wireless sensor networks for buildings to monitor energy consumption and structural integrity for earthquake preparedness. Like many ITR projects, CITRIS also has industry backers such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

"This new NSF grant will allow our faculty and students to design and build the underlying technologies for the Internet of the 21st century, now sometimes referred to as the 'Evernet' — a dependable, reliable, and secure information technology infrastructure that will connect trillions of devices, not just millions of computers," said A. Richard Newton, dean of the UCB College of Engineering.

"The research agenda of CITRIS is not just more and better technology, but making the massive amounts of information provided accessible and useful to all people who need it," added James Demmel, CITRIS chief scientist.

— Claudia Willen

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