Where The Federal Dollars Are Going
By Ed Sperling
The money flowing into pure research in computer science is rising, thanks to the federal stimulus package.
This year’s contribution to pure research—the kind that isn’t necessarily tied to a definitive result—will be $809 million this year, up from $535 million last year. The request for 2010 is $633 million.
The funding will find its way into a variety of long-term research projects financed by the National Science Foundation, according to Jeannette Wing, assistant director of computer and information science and engineering at the NSF. In a speech at the Design Automation Conference, Wing said much of the funding will be used in areas such as multicore programming, which could greatly boost demand for multicore chips, as well as nano research and new materials for semiconductors.
The funding will generally fall into the following areas:
- High risk, potentially transformative research that includes big ideas and bold vision;
- Multi-perspective research that involves partnerships between academia, industry and government, as well as those technologies that address grand challenges for society such as climate change;
- Cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, focusing on extractions, algorithms and data structures;
- Multicore, many core and massively parallel software programming models, languages and tools;
- Nanocomputing, bio-inspired computing in which individual molecules are involved and chemical reactions provide the communications, as well as quantum computing, and
- Computational sustainability, a new field focusing on intractability, molecular programming and the open programmable mobile Internet.
Wing noted that the NSF has not yet announced the 2009 awards. Other areas of focus include data-intensive computing, cyber physical systems and complexity science.
