Copyright State Science & Technology Institute 2002. Information in this issue of the SSTI Weekly Digest was prepared under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration. Redistribution to all others interested in tech-based economic development is strongly encouraged — please cite the State Science & Technology Institute whenever portions are reproduced or redirected. Any opinions expressed in the Digest do not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
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COMMENTS ON ATP SOUGHT
As part of a review of the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) ordered by Commerce Secretary William Daley, public input is being sought on the operations and direction of the program. The outcome of the review is to be incorporated in the Department's recommendations to the Secretary on possible program modifications.The department is particularly interested in receiving comments on specific questions in four topic areas. The four topics and some of the questions are:
Company participation
- Should large companies only participate as members of joint ventures?
- What are the appropriate criteria to judge whether greater benefit would accrue by extending an existing focused program or by initiating a new one?
Private Capital Markets
- What are the possible sources of private funding available for such projects and how could those sources be made available to potential program applicants?
Regional Distribution of Awards
- Are there mechanisms that should be explored to foster high quality proposals from companies in states that lack large numbers of R&D intensive companies?
- Should a separate program be set up specifically to aid states that are under represented in the ATP, and should it also apply to under represented states in other federal R&D programs?
Other Assistance to Applicants
- What additional information could ATP provide to potential applicants, particularly smaller companies, that would assist them in developing proposals?
- Should the ATP provide information to unsuccessful applicants about other possible sources of financial assistance to pursue R&D that is judged meritorious?
Comments are due by May 5. A copy of the Federal Register notice can be obtained on the Web at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/docs/atp_fr970404.htm or by calling SSTI at 614/421-SSTI (7784).
DEADLINES APPROACHING FOR NEW DUAL USE INITIATIVE
The Army, Air Force and Navy are soliciting proposals under the Science and Technology Initiative of the FY1997 Dual Use Applications Program (DUAP). In the Science and Technology Initiative, the individual military services will identify industry proposals that develop technologies with both military relevance and potential commercial applications.Each service will create a ranked list of competitively selected dual use S&T projects to be considered for in DUAP funding. Projects must be 50 percent cost shared with industry. Additionally, each service will contribute at least 25 percent of the total cost of each project, with DUAP providing the remaining 25 percent.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Joint Dual Use Program Office will reconcile the nominations of all three services within the approximately $100 million budgeted for the initiative, and the Dual-Use Steering Group will make the final selections for the DUAP funding. Proposals will be evaluated according to the following criteria: impact on national defense; technical approach and executability; commercial viability of technology; and, quality of cost share.
The services started announcing their projects last month and are requesting that proposals be submitted under extremely compressed time schedules.
Two of the Army's four Broad Agency Announce-ments (BAA) are still open. Proposals are due in Communications Electronics Command by April 30. Proposals are due April 21 for the Armament Research and Development Engineering Center.
Deadlines for applications under the Navy and Air Force programs have either passed or occur in the next week.
More information is available from the Dual Use Applications Program at 1-800-DUAL-USE or from their homepage at http://www.trp.arpa.mil/ jdupo/index.html
NSF ANNOUNCES NEW COMPUTER PARTNERSHIPS
The National Science Board recently chose two awardees for the National Science Foundation's new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure program. The National Computational Science Alliance (led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (led by the University of California, San Diego) have been chosen for the awards.The NSF Supercomputer Centers, begun in 1985, were created to maintain the nation's lead in computer science and engineering, in other academic disciplines that depend on those computers, and in the industrial applications that follow. NSF funded four supercomputing centers. In addition to the centers at University of Illinois and University of California-San Diego, centers at Cornell University and a partnership between University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University were selected.
In 1995, a National Science Foundation task force recommended restructuring the Supercomputer Centers program, resulting in the creation of the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure and the reduction of supercomputing centers from four to two.
With the recent awards, NSF funding for the Cornell Theory Center and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will be phased out over two years. According to an article in the Pittsburgh Business Times, the Pittsburgh center will lose about $16 million a year--nearly 75 percent of its annual budget.
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