research

The Biden Administration issued an executive order earlier this week that provides guidance on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the U.S. The EO includes guidance for agencies to work to provide new opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs in AI and other directives.

The economies, the wellbeing, and the stories of the U.S. and China have become so intertwined and so interdependent that individuals not following global political-military-ideological studies might be excused for getting lost in the narrative, let alone following such a complex plot. There won’t be a simplifying explanation offered here, but there are a few new twists in the storyline SSTI wanted to share that may relate to the innovation investment, product development, and exit strategies for some parties within the TBED community. 

In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress passed the Land-Grant Agricultural and Mechanical College Act of 1862 (a.k.a. the Morrill Act of 1862). This legislation extended educational opportunities for many White working-class Americans. But it did little to extend education to Black people. The Morrill Act of 1890 passed 28 years later created new land grant institutions to address the issue of Black peoples’ access to higher education. But racial inequities between the two land-grant systems have persisted into the present day. And as noted in The Century Foundation’s (TCF’s) paper, “Nourishing the Nation While Starving; The Underfunding of Black Land-Grant Colleges and Universities,” even though the 1890 universities have many proud accomplishments, the cumulative damage from unequal treatment between the 1862 and 1890 universities is significant.

Over the last month, the Department of Energy (DOE), National Science Foundation (NSF), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have released plans for complying with a 2022 White House policy that requires scientific papers resulting from federally funded research to be freely available upon publication, sunsetting the current one-year embargo period by 2025.

NIST has released a plan to make its scientific data and publications more readily available and accessible, following a memo from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) instructing all government agencies to do so. NIST has presented its plan in its June 30 Draft for Public Comment, now open for comment. Comments may be submitted until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on August 14 here.

Despite Carnegie Classification as an R2 institution, Northern Illinois University (NIU) and other similar universities do not qualify for existing R&D capacity-building initiatives targeting Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) states or minority-serving institutions (MSIs). In a recent article, Northern Illinois University administrators defended the necessity for a new designation for federal agencies to use to prioritize R&D funding for institutions such as NIU.

New fiscal year (FY) 2021 Higher Education Research & Development (HERD) survey data released by the National Science Foundation (NSF) reveals a $3.4 billion (4%) increase in research and development (R&D) spending by institutions of higher education ($86.5 to $89.9 billion), driven almost entirely by a decades high federal government R&D funding increase of $3 billion.

NIH just launched the funding opportunity announcement for the third cohort of its regional biomedical proof-of-concept and accelerator program, the Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hubs. On Dec. 12, NIH will be hosting a funding opportunity announcement pre-application webinar which will provide a question and answer opportunity with NIH SEED and NIGMS.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science recently announced new requirements for all research proposal applications. Applicants must submit a plan for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research — or PIER Plan — with their research proposal during the solicitation process. The PIER Plans will be required beginning in FY 2023 and will require investigators to describe strategies to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all research projects. Larger research teams will be expected to provide more detailed PIER Plans. A new merit review criterion will evaluate these PIER Plans during the peer review process.

Recent findings from a study titled The Death of Downtown? Pandemic Recovery Trajectories across 62 North American Cities, conducted by a group of six researchers at the University of California’s Berkeley campus's Institute of Governmental Studies found that U.S. and Canadian downtowns are recovering from COVID-19 related setbacks at much slower rates than the “rest of the city,” and many downtown areas are still seeing less visits than pre-pandemic levels.