CONTACT(S)

Deadline(s)

NOTE: All program proposal due dates that fall on a weekend are due the following working day by 5:00PM your local time

SCOPE

The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Computing Research Infrastructure program supports the acquisition, development, enhancement, and operation of research infrastructure that enables discovery, learning, and innovation in all computing fields supported by CISE.  Supported infrastructure includes instrumentation needed by a few research or research and education projects, major experimental facilities for an entire department or for multi-institutional projects, and testbeds or data archives for an entire subfield of CISE researchers. 

One goal of the CISE Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) program is to provide infrastructure that enables high-quality computing research and education.  A second goal is to extend the set of individuals and departments that are able to conduct such activities.  The CRI program is committed to maintaining a broad portfolio that supports research and education across a diverse population and lessens the digital divide. The program encourages proposals that are from or that include minority-serving institutions.

The CRI program will support a variety of infrastructure needs, such as general or specialized research equipment, technical support, and/or software.  CRI will also support the development of infrastructure that can be used by others, such as data archives or libraries of software tools.  The primary criteria are that the infrastructure facilitates the conduct of high-quality research and related education, and that it cannot be acquired or developed without funding resources beyond those available from individual research and education grants and the host institution.

The CRI program will make three kinds of awards.  Cost sharing is specialized as summarized below and described in detail in Section V. B.

• Infrastructure Acquisition. These awards have budgets up to $2,000,000.  Cost sharing is not required on small grants; cost sharing of 20% is required on medium grants but only from Ph.D.-granting institutions; cost sharing of 30% is required on large grants but only from Ph.D.-granting institutions.
• Community Resource Development.  These awards have budgets from $300,000 to $2,000,000:  medium from $300,000 to $800,000 and large over $800,000.  Cost sharing is not required on these awards.  Development projects create a resource for an entire CISE research community, such as a testbed for evaluating research results or a large data resource that contains problems a community is trying to solve (e.g., annotated speech data).
• Planning.  These awards facilitate the preparation of a proposal for a medium or large infrastructure acquisition grant.   They have budgets up to $50,000 for one institution or up to $100,000 if more than one institution is involved.  Cost sharing is not required. 

The CRI program replaces and expands upon three previous programs:  Minority Institutional Infrastructure (MII), Research Infrastructure (RI), and Research Resources (RR).  The most significant new features are that CRI will support resource development grants in addition to infrastructure acquisition grants and that personnel may be supported when well justified.

NSF Document: NSF 04-588

Abstracts of Awards
Proposal Submission Guidelines