NSF announces Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Research in the SBE Sciences

The NSF Directorates for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) and Education & Human Resources (EHR), together with the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) recently announced a solicitation for Building Community and Capacity for Data-Intensive Research (http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2012/nsf12538/nsf12538.htm?WT.mc_id=USNSF_25&WT....) with a proposal deadline of 2012-05-22. Here are some snippets from the solicitation.

• [We] seek to enable research communities to develop visions, teams, and capabilities dedicated to creating new, large-scale, next-generation data resources and relevant analytic techniques to advance fundamental research for the SBE and EHR sciences. Successful proposals will outline activities that will have significant impacts across multiple fields by enabling new types of data-intensive research. Investigators should think broadly and create a vision that extends intellectually across multiple disciplines and that includes--but is not limited to--the SBE or EHR sciences.
• The purpose of this announcement is to encourage submission of proposals for activities that will enable communities to develop visions for next-generation data and specific areas of research these data would enable; to build research and management teams for the integration of research, data, and data infrastructure, including automated and other analysis tools; and to prototype aspects of a proposed next-generation infrastructure. Workshop proposals, two or three-year Research Coordination Network proposals, and regular unsolicited proposals are all appropriate mechanisms for achieving these capacity-building goals. Submitted proposals should focus on the development of communities and infrastructure within which identified research may effectively proceed rather than the conduct of research itself.
• Successful proposals will outline activities that will have significant impacts across multiple fields by enabling new types of data-intensive research. Investigators should think broadly and create a vision that extends intellectually across multiple disciplines and that includes--but is not limited to--the SBE or EHR sciences. Proposals will need to describe the bodies of next-generation data that will be involved in the infrastructure. Investigators should think creatively about data and consider new data collections, repurposed existing data, and new approaches to data as appropriate for the research questions of interest. Novel approaches are encouraged.

  Estimated Number of Awards: 25 to 60
  Anticipated Funding Amount: $5,000,000 in FY 2012
  For details about budget limits for proposals of various types, see the solicitation.