Grant List
Represents Grant table in the DB
GET /v1/grants?page%5Bnumber%5D=1385&sort=-awardee_organization
{ "links": { "first": "https://cic-apps.datascience.columbia.edu/v1/grants?page%5Bnumber%5D=1&sort=-awardee_organization", "last": "https://cic-apps.datascience.columbia.edu/v1/grants?page%5Bnumber%5D=1405&sort=-awardee_organization", "next": "https://cic-apps.datascience.columbia.edu/v1/grants?page%5Bnumber%5D=1386&sort=-awardee_organization", "prev": "https://cic-apps.datascience.columbia.edu/v1/grants?page%5Bnumber%5D=1384&sort=-awardee_organization" }, "data": [ { "type": "Grant", "id": "13130", "attributes": { "award_id": "2151093", "title": "Constraining the Direct Radiative Forcing of Desert Dust", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Geosciences (GEO)", "GVF - Global Venture Fund" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 28726, "first_name": "Yolande L.", "last_name": "Serra", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2022-05-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 677961, "principal_investigator": { "id": 29152, "first_name": "Jasper", "last_name": "Kok", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "Desert dust accounts for about two thirds of the total mass of particulate matter in our atmosphere. One of the reasons that dust is so abundant is that it has increased substantially, perhaps even doubled, since the Industrial Revolution. This large increase is probably because of human actions like clearing land for agriculture. Surprisingly, the impact of the increasing desert dust on the climate system has remained mysterious. In fact, it is still an open question whether this historical increase in dust has contributed to or counteracted greenhouse gas warming of the climate system. This project will answer this question by (i) determining the change in Earth’s energy budget produced by the scattering and absorbing of solar and terrestrial radiation by dust, (ii) determining the amount by which dust has increased since the Industrial Revolution, and (iii) determining the resultant change in Earth’s energy budget from the increase in dust. These goals will be achieved by combining satellite observations, aircraft measurements, numerous records of how deposition of desert dust has changed across the world, and numerical simulations of how dust affects Earth’s radiation budget. The research will be performed by a team of scientists that include undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral scholar.<br/><br/>Determining the climate impact of the historical increase in desert dust is important because calculations of how sensitive the climate system is to greenhouse warming depend on the extent to which greenhouse warming has been counteracted by cooling produced by particulate matter like dust. This project will thus result in more accurate predictions of the climate changes produced by future increases in greenhouse gases, which is critical to an effective societal response to those changes. The project will also continue a successful outreach project to under-served high schools in the Los Angeles area.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "13218", "attributes": { "award_id": "2211345", "title": "EAGER: Machine Learning and Data Assimilation for Discovery of Generalized Fokker-Planck Equation for Radiation Belt Modeling", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Geosciences (GEO)", "MAGNETOSPHERIC PHYSICS" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 28789, "first_name": "Chia-Lin", "last_name": "Huang", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2022-04-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 250059, "principal_investigator": { "id": 29268, "first_name": "Dmitri", "last_name": "Kondrashov", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [ { "id": 29267, "first_name": "Alexander Y", "last_name": "Drozdov", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This project supports a two-year investigation into a better understanding and prediction of the extreme dynamic regions of space known as the Van Allen radiation belts. The near-Earth radiation environment is filled with high-energy particles trapped by the Earth's magnetic field. The particle intensity and distribution change as part of a much larger space weather system driven by the Sun. The radiation belts can be hazardous for satellites and astronauts in space. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to predict these energetic particles better for our space exploration. <br/><br/>The new investigation is expected to lead to a more accurate understanding of the radiation belts using a novel combination of data assimilation and machine learning methods to discover generalized Fokker-Planck equations for radiation belt modeling. The Principal Investigator (PI) will use University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA)'s Versatile Electron Radiation Belt (VERB) model and data assimilation to learn and incorporate additional dynamical terms that would describe nonlinear wave-particle kinetic effects. The project will promote and pave the way for novel use of machine learning and data assimilation tools to discover missing physics in high-dimensional and complex space physics models. The initial implementation and vetting of combined data assimilation and machine learning algorithms in the radiation belt diffusion model will not only lead to significant advances in space weather modeling capabilities. Still, they will also have substantial broader impacts on space plasma physics and other disciplines. The project will thus have the potential to drastically change our understanding of radiation belt modeling, and advanced tools can find broader use for Earth's climate studies and engineering.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "13227", "attributes": { "award_id": "2143910", "title": "CAREER: Reward Learning Shapes the Fear Circuit", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Biological Sciences (BIO)", "Cross-BIO Activities" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 739, "first_name": "Edda", "last_name": "Thiels", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2022-04-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 1250939, "principal_investigator": { "id": 29280, "first_name": "Alicia", "last_name": "Izquierdo", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>Neuroscience research tends to conceptualize particular brain regions as specialized to encode particular types of memories. This has led to concerted efforts to locate specific memory engrams in the brain that we could eventually manipulate at will. For example, we often think about fear memories as being exclusively encoded in the brain’s “fear center”, called the amygdala. If we could locate the fear engram in the amygdala, one day we might be able to erase problematic fear memories. However, our recent work has challenged this idea of regional specialization. Specifically, we found that a brain region usually restricted to encoding rewarding memories, the hypothalamus, can be recruited to encode future fear memories if subjects have recently experienced something rewarding. Now, we will 1) investigate if this constitutes a shift away from the traditional amygdala fear circuit, 2) reveal the wider circuit that supports hypothalamic regions in the encoding of fear memories, and 3) expose whether the recruitment of hypothalamic circuits to encode fearful memories is permanent or transient. Together, this work will reveal a more fluid approach to conceptualizing memory formation in the brain. We will disseminate this knowledge to the wider community in an undergraduate seminar course while trialing the teaching philosophy “learning by observing and pitching in”, which is designed to accommodate the educational needs of the diverse student population at UCLA. Further, this project will support paid research opportunities for undergraduate students to work on the proposed experiments and prepare them for careers in scientific research.<br/> <br/>We generally conceive of particular neural circuits as being specialized to encode particular types of information. However, we have recently revealed a phenomenon that calls this into question. We have shown that lateral hypothalamus (LH) can be recruited to encode fear memories, given appropriate prior experience (Sharpe et al., 2021, Nature Neuroscience). That is, LH GABAergic neurons are not necessary to encode fear memories in experimentally-naïve rodents. However, if rodents have had experience in reward learning, which is dependent on LH function, LH GABAergic neurons become critical for the encoding fear. This showed that reward learning “primes” LH to encode fear memories. We hypothesize that reward learning recruits a novel LH fear circuit to encode fear, which constitutes a shift away from the traditional amygdala circuit, in a manner that degrades with time since reward learning experience. We will use cell-type specific optogenetics and fiber photometry of a genetically-encoded calcium sensor, to investigate the causal and correlative dynamics of this phenomenon. We propose to examine: 1) if reward learning reduces the role of basolateral amygdala in encoding fear, 2) where the LH receives the necessary aversive teaching signal to encode fear memories, and 3) if increasing the delay between reward and fear procedures attenuates the involvement of LH GABAergic neurons in encoding fear. This will reveal a dynamic system that shifts between circuits that encode information depending on prior experience, which may have evolved to help us adapt to changing environments by utilizing existing cognitive schema from recent learning episodes.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "13580", "attributes": { "award_id": "2126607", "title": "OCE-PRF: Variability in connectivity and receptivity of highly dynamic coastal ecosystems: implications for community structure and function in a recipient soft-sediment ecosystem", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Geosciences (GEO)", "OCE Postdoctoral Fellowships" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 28765, "first_name": "Timothy", "last_name": "Crone", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2021-12-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 280763, "principal_investigator": { "id": 29742, "first_name": "Kyle", "last_name": "Emery", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>Coastal ecosystems face pressures from both the land and the sea, including development and sea level rise. It is important to better understand how coastal ecosystems function so that predictions can be made about how they may change under future conditions and to better manage these environments now and in the future. This project will use long-term data, observational studies, and experiments to learn more about the relationship between kelp forests and sandy beaches. Specifically, this project will explore how waves, tides, and sea level control the amount of kelp wrack that washes ashore, how the condition of kelp forests impacts the ecology of sandy beaches, and how beach wrack provides habitat and food for animals that live or find food on beaches. This project will develop new research methods using drones and start new, long-term monitoring datasets that will contribute to the conservation of these important coastal ecosystems. Additionally, this project will support the next generation of marine scientists and increase diversity in the field by providing research opportunities and mentoring to under-represented minorities at the undergraduate and high school levels. This project will also increase community awareness of coastal ecosystems and conservation issues through Earth Day participation, guest lecturing at public high schools, and public biology days at the university. <br/><br/>Cross-ecosystem connectivity is a critical feature of many ecosystems and has important implications for food webs, biodiversity, and ecosystem functioning. Sandy beach ecosystems provide a unique study system for the role of ecosystem subsidies because of strong natural gradients in the type and amount of marine wrack inputs and the dependence of multiple trophic levels on wrack for food and habitat. The proposed research will use a combination of observations, experiments, and theory to explore how environmental attributes, including ecosystem connectivity, food web subsidies, and natural variation work across scales to affect multiple levels of biological organization and ecosystem functioning. This study will utilize nearshore rocky reefs and sandy beaches to understand the fate of subsidies under varying environmental conditions, determine how variability and stability in a donor ecosystem affects the structure and function of the recipient ecosystem, and to explore how variability in the type and supply rate of subsidies affects its colonization and remineralization. This project will also initiate and contribute to long-term monitoring datasets and utilize unoccupied aerial vehicle-based methodology and analyses to quantify ecosystem subsidy dynamics and fate across spatial and temporal scales. Using a natural gradient in kelp forest persistence and a manipulative field experiment varying subsidy inputs, it will explore how subsidy variability impacts the biodiversity of multiple sandy beach trophic groups. Field experiments will be utilized to better constrain the dynamics and fate of subsidies over time and across a range of oceanographic and beach conditions. This research will expand understanding of the coupling between kelp forests and beaches and the fate of detrital kelp export. Results from field surveys and experiments will also further elucidate the importance of ecosystem connectivity for critical ecosystem functions from promoting and maintaining biodiversity to secondary productivity and other aspects of this detrital food web. This study will have implications for management and conservation of coastal ecosystems in the face of reduced connectivity, increased variability, and loss of food resources and habitat associated with global climate change and other direct anthropogenic pressures.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "13922", "attributes": { "award_id": "2055192", "title": "Collaborative Research: Flow Channel Control of Substorm Expansion Phase Spatial Coverage and Duration", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Geosciences (GEO)", "AERONOMY" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 28763, "first_name": "Shikha", "last_name": "Raizada", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2021-09-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 379856, "principal_investigator": { "id": 30341, "first_name": "Jiang", "last_name": "Liu", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [ { "id": 30341, "first_name": "Jiang", "last_name": "Liu", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>Space weather describes the variations in the space environment between the Sun and Earth. Space weather often manifests as substorms, where a beautiful auroral display is accompanied by an electrical current in space which can impact systems and technologies in orbit and on Earth, such as spacecraft and power distribution systems. The substorm is localized in time (a few hours) and space (polar region). The space weather effects of a substorm depend not only on its peak instantaneous strength, but also on the highly variable spatial extent and duration. Despite their significant importance, the spatial extent and duration has received little attention due to the lack of ideas on what may be the important factors. It has recently become known that flow channels of charged particles within the auroral oval (the ring of aurora above the Earth’s geomagnetic North Pole) that move from higher to lower latitude are a crucial feature of the oval and are responsible for the onset of a substorm. This research project will focus on the role of these flow channels that occur after substorm onset and evaluate whether they play a crucial role in controlling the local time extent, the poleward expansion, and the duration of the substorm. This project will benefit society by advancing understanding of space weather disturbances, which significantly affect space and susceptible ground systems. More specifically, current space weather forecasting has some validity over long time scales, but severely lacks the ability to predict onset, duration, and spatial coverage of short term (e.g., substorm and streamer time scales) disturbances. This project is directly aimed at this issue by examining what determines spatial and temporal development of individual disturbances. The project will also set further precedents on coordinated use of ground-based capabilities to attack major facets of coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere physics. The team will promote research partnerships and coordination between the relevant research activities at UCLA, Boston University, and Penn State to publicize and develop new approaches for maximizing return from NSF observing facilities. The research will also continue to provide material and motivation for a UCLA freshman seminar (“Fiat Lux”) course at UCLA “Secrets of the Northern Lights: The Earth’s aurora” that has stimulated a talented, diverse, and enthusiastic group of students, leading undergraduate research projects.<br/><br/>Since flow channel related flows and field-aligned currents map along magnetic field lines that connect the magnetosphere and ionosphere, the team will study observations from primarily NSF-funded (and some other) radars and all-sky imagers over North America of ionospheric flows and aurora (which represent upward field-aligned currents). This allows the team to make two-dimensional measurement versus time, which cannot be done with sparse spacecraft. The investigators will also make use of a major new development in 2-D flow determination from radar data. The goals of this project are to establish: 1. Are plasma flows relative to the azimuthal expansion of the brightening of the onset arc consistent with that brightening expansion being the result of azimuthal expansion of the low entropy plasma from the onset flow channel as predicted by the Rice Convection Model? 2. What is the role of post-onset flow channels outside the auroral bulge in controlling the longitudinal development of substorm expansion? 3. Are polar cap flow channels directed toward the poleward boundary of the active substorm auroral bulge important in controlling further poleward expansion and the duration of substorm expansion-phase auroral activity? 4. Is the longitudinal extent and duration of the expansion-phase-like disturbances that initiate from the auroral polar boundary controlled by polar cap flow channels?<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "13938", "attributes": { "award_id": "2121561", "title": "Collaborative Research: Ice Forcing in Arc Magma Plumbing Systems (IF-AMPS)", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Geosciences (GEO)", "FRES-Frontier Rsrch Earth Sci" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 13167, "first_name": "Candace", "last_name": "Major", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2021-09-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 214006, "principal_investigator": { "id": 30366, "first_name": "Joshua", "last_name": "Cuzzone", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/>A question at the frontier of Earth science is: how do changes in the climate system on our planet's surface interact with magma reservoirs housed within its interior? We will conduct a novel blend of field observations, lab measurements, and numerical model simulations in an integrated study of links between changes in glaciers and topography, and the behavior of several active volcanoes in Chile during the last 50,000 years. These volcanoes were partly covered by the 3,000 foot thick Patagonian ice sheet until it melted rapidly beginning 18,000 years ago. This natural laboratory offers unparalleled means to investigate how the rapid loss of ice impacted the composition and rates of eruptions from these volcanoes. This project will provide career-building experience for several PhD students. A volcano & ice Summer program will engage technical school students from underrepresented groups in the US and Chile in field- and lab-based experiences, including training in drone technology for data collection and geologic mapping. Our collaborations with Chilean scientists and educators aim to: (1) enhance knowledge of the growth rates and eruptive histories of several of the most dangerous volcanoes in South America, thereby improving hazard assessment, (2) generate new climate proxy data critical to calibrating our numerical model of ice sheet retreat, and (3) train students from the communities living near these volcanoes.<br/> Utilizing new and existing geochronologic, geochemical, glacial and erosion/deposition observations within the Andean Southern Volcanic Zone, we aim to couple a suite of numerical models to test and refine three hypotheses: (1) Over short timescales (<100,000 year), the composition, volume, and timing of eruptions are strongly influenced by climate-driven changes in surface loading. These short-term responses modulate the long-term (>100,000 year) average eruptive characteristics, which are governed by mantle melt flux, (2) Crustal stress changes associated with the local onset of rapid deglaciation and erosion at 18,000 years ago promoted eruptions by enhancing volatile exsolution that in turn pressurized stored magma and propelled dike propagation to the surface, and (3) Responses to rapid unloading will vary among volcanoes, reflecting contrasts in the composition, volatile contents, and compressibility of stored magma, as well as the rate at which crustal reservoirs are recharged from depth. This variability can be exploited to reveal fundamental controls on the sensitivity of glaciated arcs to the climate system. To investigate these hypotheses, we will pursue four objectives: (1) Generate high-resolution records of cone growth, eruptive behavior, and geochemical evolution of six volcanoes during the last ~50,000 years spanning 250 km along the subduction zone, (2) Build new records of ice retreat, and landscape evolution owing to the erosion, transport, and deposition of sediment adjacent to the six volcanoes, (3) Use the observed chemical and physical patterns in the volcanic, climatic, and topographic records to constrain crustal loading through time, and explore the effects of this forcing in numerical models, and (4) Integrate findings to contextualize processes in continental settings, and provide a framework for examining the sensitivity of arc volcanism to external forcing elsewhere and across a spectrum of climate states throughout Earth history.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "14323", "attributes": { "award_id": "2124685", "title": "Doctoral Dissertation Research: Evaluating the Promise and Pitfalls of Benchmarking in Machine Learning Research", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE)", "Science of Science" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 792, "first_name": "Mary", "last_name": "Feeney", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2021-08-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 20003, "principal_investigator": { "id": 30917, "first_name": "Jacob", "last_name": "Foster", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [ { "id": 30916, "first_name": "Bernard", "last_name": "Koch", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>The scientific and commercial success of machine learning (ML) has spurred government and corporate sponsors to invest billions of dollars in machine learning research. Despite this massive investment, there is limited quantitative research on how the ML field measures progress: a process called “benchmarking.” Benchmarking is the act of comparing algorithms on a quantitative metric after training them on the same benchmark dataset. Benchmarks organize ML researchers around common tasks. Achieving “state of the art” performance on an important benchmark can spark new research trajectories and advance careers: consider the 2012 success of “AlexNet” in a prominent computer vision task, which helped to launch current interest in deep learning. However, the practice of benchmarking has already engendered criticism that this near-ubiquitous research culture does not push the field towards socially beneficial outcomes, and leads to overinvestment in methods that maximize performance on academic datasets but are environmentally unsustainable or harm the public when used in the real world. This dissertation research will provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of benchmarking practices with respect to several public aims: accelerating innovation in science, increasing equity within the field, and promoting ethical research (i.e., an orientation toward research that benefits society and avoids harms). By blending sociological analysis, computational methods for extracting and analyzing benchmarking data from thousands of papers, and in-depth qualitative interviews, this research will produce an understanding of benchmarking culture in ML research that combines breadth and quantitative rigor with depth and interpretive nuance. This project has significant implications for government and corporate funders, researchers, and society more broadly. <br/><br/>The dissertation consists of three subprojects. The first subproject explores evidence that benchmarking culture has stymied innovation by favoring utilization of the same datasets across multiple tasks and by incentivizing researchers to underinvest on nascent benchmarks and overinvest on mature ones. The second subproject explores how patterns in the adoption of benchmarks and rewards for state-of-the-art performance interact with status and resources to create inequities in the field. It tests the hypothesis that high-status researchers and institutions have disproportionate power to set the field’s research agenda by introducing benchmarks, while garnering disproportionate citations for state-of-the-art achievements. Both of these phenomena have the potential to create a “Matthew Effect” that disadvantages under-represented and under-resourced researchers/institutions. These subprojects use network science, natural language processing, and manual coding to create a large dataset of benchmarks and progress on those benchmarks across multiple ML task communities. The third subproject consists of qualitative interviews with ML researchers across career stages and expertise to gain first-hand perspectives on benchmarking culture and assess reforms to improve research ethics and societal outcomes.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "15113", "attributes": { "award_id": "2414382", "title": "Collaborative Research: The causes and consequences of Higher Order Interactions (HOI)", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Biological Sciences (BIO)", "Animal Behavior" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 31658, "first_name": "Kim L.", "last_name": "Hoke", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2024-09-01", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 926511, "principal_investigator": { "id": 31659, "first_name": "Noa", "last_name": "Pinter-Wollman", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "By developing a framework to study higher order interactions, i.e., simultaneous interactions, the funded work will provide novel tools to analyze complex systems. The COVID-19 pandemic was challenging to control because people could catch the disease from accumulating many short exposures to multiple infected people, i.e., from higher order interactions, which are rarely considered in epidemiological models. Similarly, the efficient transfer of goods was another casualty of the pandemic due to supply-chain disruptions. Higher order interactions, in which goods are exchanged simultaneously, can substantially expedite the transfer of goods and increase the robustness and resilience of supply-chains to disruptions. The general framework that will be developed in this grant will use a tractable biological system to develop mathematical tools to study the causes and consequences of higher order interactions. The mathematical models and tools developed will be general, to allow application to other systems, such as communication, disease transmission, and social learning. Public health and bioeconomics are two examples of fields that can benefit from the funded work. The work will be published in general journals with a wide interdisciplinary readership and the analysis code will be made publicly available. Both PIs have a strong track record of recruiting and facilitating the success of students from groups that are unrepresented in the sciences and this commitment to mentoring a diverse population of trainees in interdisciplinary work will continue. To further disseminate the work to the general public, podcast episodes will be produced and distributed widely. <br/><br/>Collective outcomes, such as the social behavior of animals, emerge from interactions among system components. While substantial work has been devoted to examining the intricate network of interactions among animals, these interactions are described and analyzed as dyadic events. However, multiple individuals can interact simultaneously. For example, an alarm call is broadcast to multiple individuals at once rather than through multiple one-on-one interactions. Despite the important conceptual and functional differences between dyadic and higher order interactions, there are only few methodological approaches that emphasize the higher order nature of social interactions. The proposed work will examine the causes and consequences of higher order interactions, and the feedback between them, by adapting and implementing existing mathematical tools from algebraic topology, simplicial sets, in novel ways. Specifically, the aims include to determine the conditions under which higher order interactions emerge; to examine the consequences of higher order interactions; and to investigate feedback between causes and consequences of higher order interactions to uncover potential evolutionary pathways for their emergence. Social insects are an especially powerful system for examining the questions in the proposal because of the profound fitness consequences of interactions among individuals for the group. Therefore, the proposed work will use foraging and food transmission of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) as a model system to examine the internal and external causes and consequences of higher order interactions. Project outcomes will enable innovative approaches to fundamental and generalizable questions which are currently beyond our reach.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "15660", "attributes": { "award_id": "2413062", "title": "NSF-ANR MCB/PHY: Virus self-assembly, from test tube to cell cytoplasm", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Unknown", "Molecular Biophysics" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 15289, "first_name": "Wilson", "last_name": "Francisco", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2024-12-15", "end_date": null, "award_amount": 987566, "principal_investigator": { "id": 32168, "first_name": "William", "last_name": "Gelbart", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] }, "other_investigators": [ { "id": 3324, "first_name": "Roya", "last_name": "Zandi", "orcid": null, "emails": "[email protected]", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [ { "id": 153, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Riverside", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true } ] } ], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "Coming out of the most severe and destructive viral pandemic of the past 100 years, the importance of understanding how viruses “work” is clear. Most viruses – including polio, yellow fever, Dengue, and SARS, etc. – have RNA genomes that are quickly turned or “translated” into viral proteins in host cells that self-assembled into new virus particles called capsids. Elucidating how this process happens is a high priority for preventing and treating these infections. This project sets out to connect in vivo experiments carried out in live cells with in vitro experiments carried out in a test tube with purified viral capsid proteins and RNA genome. While test tube studies allow for full control of the types and numbers of components and solution conditions in which they are interacting, live cells studies, on the other hand, involve viral RNA and capsid proteins in the presence of many unknown components whose effects on RNA translation and self-assembly into capsids have not yet been determined. The fundamental understanding that results from this research will enhance the ability to develop anti-viral treatments. Graduate students will be trained in an inter-/cross-disciplinary range of physical, chemical, biological, and translational medicine concepts and methods. Active outreach efforts aim at enhancing interest and understanding of science amongst budding scientists and lay persons of all kinds will be conducted. This project will be performed by an international collaboration between five different research groups in the US and France, each specializing in different experimental and theoretical techniques and each having extensive experience with one or the other of the plant (cowpea chlorotic mottle virus [CCMV]) and mammalian (hepatitis B [HepB]) viruses under study. These viruses were chosen because how significantly they differ in their host cell and capsid structure, so that general principles of viral self-assembly can be established. It is the goal of this project to elucidate the differences between in vitro and in cellulo viral processes by progressively adding to RNA and capsid protein a series of molecules that play key roles in the viral “life” cycle, mimicking the crowded interior of the cell. Using cell-free cytoplasmic (ribosome-rich) extract, viral RNA will be translated into protein products and the time course of capsid assembly will be investigated by a combination of experimental techniques, including magnetic resonance, X-ray scattering, and fluorescence and electron microscopies. Coarse-grained molecular dynamics computations and phenomenological theory will be used to analyze these kinetic data and to compare with what is learned using the same experimental techniques applied to corresponding virus assembly in test tubes, where all concentrations and solution conditions are controlled. This collaborative US/France project is supported by the US National Science Foundation and the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche, where NSF funds the US investigator and ANR funds the partners in France. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } }, { "type": "Grant", "id": "331", "attributes": { "award_id": "2146828", "title": "CIF: Small: Group Testing for Epidemics Control", "funder": { "id": 3, "ror": "https://ror.org/021nxhr62", "name": "National Science Foundation", "approved": true }, "funder_divisions": [ "Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE)" ], "program_reference_codes": [], "program_officials": [ { "id": 581, "first_name": "Scott", "last_name": "Acton", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "start_date": "2022-03-15", "end_date": "2025-02-28", "award_amount": 500000, "principal_investigator": { "id": 583, "first_name": "Christina", "last_name": "Fragouli", "orcid": null, "emails": "[email protected]", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [ { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true } ] }, "other_investigators": [ { "id": 582, "first_name": "Paulo", "last_name": "Tabuada", "orcid": null, "emails": "", "private_emails": "", "keywords": null, "approved": true, "websites": null, "desired_collaboration": null, "comments": null, "affiliations": [] } ], "awardee_organization": { "id": 151, "ror": "", "name": "University of California-Los Angeles", "address": "", "city": "", "state": "CA", "zip": "", "country": "United States", "approved": true }, "abstract": "This project develops testing and intervention (quarantine) methods in the presence of a pandemic. COVID-19 has revealed the key role of epidemiological models and testing in the fight against disease spreading. For any new virus or variant of the existing ones, society will always need to be able to expeditiously deploy strategies that allow efficient testing of populations and empower targeted interventions. Group testing is a method that has recently attracted attention for efficient testing, as it allows to identify the infected individuals in a population with many fewer tests than the ones needed to test everyone individually. A main new observation in this project is that viral diseases like SARS-CoV-2 are governed by community spread, and taking into account (even partial) knowledge of the community structure in an epidemics model (e.g., the distribution of students in classes of a school) can make such testing much more efficient and effective.Preliminary results indicate that it is possible to estimate the infection spread and evaluate the impact of interventions using a much smaller number of tests than traditional techniques.Accordingly, the goal of the project is to leverage community structure and epidemic dynamics to enable real-time estimation of infection and intervention with the following attributes: (i) it is robust to model uncertainties; (ii) it offers provable theoretical performance guarantees and (iii) it achieves low complexity of operation. To do so, the proposal combines tools from coding theory and control, and proceeds in two steps. First, assuming complete and perfect knowledge of the true underlying dynamical model, it derives test designs and intervention strategies, as well as fundamental bounds on the number of tests and amount of intervention, for both a static and state-estimation problem formulation. Building on this first step, the proposal then considers approximations to the dynamic models either because the exact dynamics are not perfectly known, or for complexity-reduction reasons. In particular, the proposal develops approximations on the evolution of marginal probabilities for popular epidemic models, derives and analyzes discretized models, explores the effect of parameter uncertainty and investigate decomposable community models; in all cases, the goal is to understand how these approximations provably affect the associated fundamental bounds, test designs, and intervention strategies to contain the disease.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.", "keywords": [], "approved": true } } ], "meta": { "pagination": { "page": 1385, "pages": 1405, "count": 14046 } } }