partnerships for innovation: building innovation capacity

National Science Foundation

Partnerships for Innovation:

Building Innovation Capacity

PFI:BIC

--“Smart” Service Systems--

Alexandra Medina-Borja, Ph.D.

Program Director

Office of the Assistant Director

Directorate for Engineering


NSF Directorate for Engineering (ENG)

Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI)

Sohi Rastegar Office of the Assistant Director Pramod Khargonekar, Assistant Director Grace Wang, Deputy Assistant Director

Senior Advisor for Nanotechnology

Mihail Roco

Chemical, Bioengineering,

Environmental, and Transport Systems

(CBET) JoAnn Lighty

Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI)

George Hazelrigg (acting)

Electrical, Communications,

and Cyber Systems (ECCS)

Samir El-Ghazaly

Engineering Education and Centers (EEC)

Theresa Maldonado

Industrial Innovation and

Partnerships (IIP)

Cheryl Albus (acting)

Innovation Corps Babu DasGupta

Program Director for Evaluation & Assessment Alexandra Medina-Borja

Program Director for Strategic Operations

Cheryl Albus

2


What is PFI: BIC?

• Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity

(PFI:BIC): SMART SERVICE SYSTEMS

– supports academe-industry partnerships,

– led by an interdisciplinary academic research

team collaborating with at least one industry partner

– to build technological, human, and service system

innovation capacity

– projects in the post-fundamental discovery space

but precede being on a clear path to

commercialization.

– understanding of human interaction with technology

to inform a human-centered service design

3


Solicitation: NSF 14-610 Key Facts

• Letter of Intent (LOI) required: December 3, 2014

• Full proposal submission deadline: January 28, 2015

• Awards: up to $1,000,000/3-year duration

– Estimated: 10 awards

– Anticipated funding: $10,000,000

• Submission restrictions:

– One (1) submission opportunity/year

– Two (2) proposals per institution, each proposal, respectively,

pursuant to its own LOI .

– Principal Investigator (PI) who proposes

• Cannot be concurrently a PI on an active award from the NSF

PFI:BIC program

• PI cannot submit both to the PFI:BIC and to the PFI:AIR program for

funding with FY 2015 funds

Industrial Innovation & Partners with hips

4


Why Smart?

• Significant advances in, [and adaptations

of], sensing, actuating, and computational

and communication technologies and their

integration into service systems have the

potential for abundant societal and

economic benefits.

5 Picture credit:http://www.augmentedrealitytrends.com


Service Systems: Socio-Technical

Configurations

6

Human interaction with

technologies and with

physical and virtual

realities can produce and

deliver service(s) never

before imagined.


Smart Service System in the

NSF Context

• Human-centered.

– It involves users, recipients, beneficiaries, providers, and/or

decision makers utilizing the information and capability provided

by the service.

• Interactions between humans and physical/virtual

realities necessarily are integral to the “service”.

• These interfaces with humans can take many forms

– co-creation, interaction, response, needs assessment,

surveillance, etc.

• The interactions need to add value to humans;

– for an activity to become a service, a human or group of

humans need to ultimately benefit from the interactions

(directly or indirectly)

7


What is a Smart Service System?

A system capable of

• learning;

• dynamic adaptation;

• decision making based upon data received,

transmitted, and/or processed;

• incorporates technologies for sensing, actuation,

coordination, communication, control, etc.; and

• may exhibit a sequence of features such as detection,

classification, and localization that lead to an outcome

occurring within a reasonable time.

8


Actions of a Smart Service System

The system does so

through

• self-detection,

self-diagnosing,

self-correcting,

self-monitoring,

self-organizing,

self-replicating, or

self-controlled

functions.

9

Credit: Georgia Tech College of Computing

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/features/go-go-social-robot


Range of Disciplines Required

In addition to those related to the technology or discovery:

(1) Systems Engineering or Engineering Design

– service system design and system integration issues.

(2) Computer Science/Information Technology

– considerations involving data transfer, communication and/or data

processing needed

(3) Human Factors/Behavioral Science/Cognitive

Engineering

– potential effects of human factors as they interact with the

technology proposed. These findings will have an impact on

ensuring that the design of the “smart” service system is human-

centered.

10


Successful Research Teams

• A minimum of one (1) industry partner of any size is

required.

– U.S.-based and with commercial revenues

• Research tasks that demonstrate a highly collaborative

research plan

– with participation of the primary industrial partner(s)

with the academic researchers during the life of the

award.

– meaningful tasks for all co-Pis senior personnel

– research effort to integrate the technology into a real

service system with human factors considerations • which in turn might spawn additional discoveries inspired by this

interaction of humans with the technology.

11


Successful integration of technology into a smart

service system

(cont.)

• Examples of technology applied to service systems”

– smart healthcare, smart cities, on-demand transportation,

precision agriculture, smart infrastructure, smart buildings,

and other technologies enabling self-service and

customized service solutions.

12

Credit: Torino Smart City http://www.torinosmartcity.it/il-future-internet-accelera-la-smart-city/


Partnership Requirements

• All industrial partners must have an explicit signed

commitment (stated in the partnership letter on

letterhead)

– Types of commitment: financial or in-kind

– If a partner qualifies as small business, and it also has a

subaward, commitment must be over and above subaward

compensation

• Other partnering—no specific requirements,

• it is likely that other partners (or additional expertise within

the academic team) might be needed;

− e.g., explicit expertise in “smart” service systems and/or to cover the

required range of disciplines in the three designated categories of the

project

13


Cognizant Program Officers

• Sara B. Nerlove, ENG/IIP/PFI:BIC, Program Director, telephone: (703) 292-7077, email: [email protected]

• Alexandra Medina-Borja, ENG/OAD, telephone: (703) 292-7557, email: [email protected]

• Gurdip Singh, CISE, telephone: (703) 292-8950, email: [email protected]

• Chris Paredis, ENG/CMMI, telephone: (703) 292-2241, email: [email protected]

• Leon Esterowitz, ENG/CBET, telephone: (703) 292-7942, email: [email protected]

• Alexander Leonessa, ENG/CBET, telephone: (703) 292-2678, email: [email protected]

Industrial Innovation &

Partnerships

14


15

partnerships for innovation: building innovation capacity

Presentations & Public Speaking