On Wednesday June 3rd the New Hampshire EPSCoR Conference and Proposal Writing Workshop was held at the Common Man Inn in Plymouth, NH.

EPSCoR stands for Experimental Project to Stimulate Competitive Research, which is not very descriptive of its purpose. The goal of this huge project is to stimulate research in science and engineering in states of the USA, which have lower concentration of research funding than others. Since 2004, New Hampshire also participates in this program. It was started as a project of the NSF (National Science Foundation) but since then other government agencies have also implemented their EPSCoR initiatives (e.g. NASA EPSCoR). As it is known, the NSF and similar institutions provide some of the most important funds for research in the country, therefore EPSCoR is also of vital importance for research labs as ours, Project54.

The conference featured a number of NSF officials who presented the most important funding aids that their institution provides. Dr. Uma Venkateswaran, the national Program Director of NSF EPSCoR gave an introductory presentation, talking about the ways they can help fund research labs in New Hampshire. The main vehicles of funding are Research Infrastructure Improvement, Co-funding with NSF Directorates and Conference and Workshop Funding.

After her, officials of different NSF Directorates held presentations of their fields. For us the most important might be the presentation of Dr. Suzanne Iacono from the CISE Directorate (Computer and Information Science and Engineering). Among other topics, she mentioned the Human Centered Computing initiative at her Directorate which funds projects aiming to improve usability and introduce human values into interaction with computers. Our work on researching in-car user interfaces, handhelds and mutitouch surfaces shares many common ideas with this program.

It is important to mention that NSF provides funding through a grant system awarded to successful proposals. The success rate of proposals is only 25% percent, but as we figured out at the conference one can improve his/her chances by elaborately studying all of NSF’ guidelines and the vast number of different programs. I found the conference to be very informative. It was also very encouraging to hear, that so much is invested in advancing science and technology in the US.

Oszkar

Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed