NCSA NEWS

U of I, CS Department Awarded ITR Funding

released September 19, 2000

Four projects from the computer science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were among 14 U of I projects recently awarded grants in the first round of funding under the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative.

The new $90 million ITR initiative provides awards for projects that will spur fundamental research and innovative applications of IT and will build on U.S. leadership in an important area of the economy. A total of 210 projects received awards. A total of 1,400 proposals were submitted.

Roy Campbell, a professor in the computer science department, will lead a team that involves a number of researchers in the department in a project called "Active Information Spaces based on Ubiquitous Computing." The award is for $3.3 million over five years. Other computer science faculty receiving awards were:

• Josep Torrellas will receive $499,973 over three years for a project called "Intelligent Memory Architectures and Algorithms to Crack the Protein Folding Problem."
• Robin Kravets will receive $497,425 over three years for a project called "Environment-Aware Communication for Mobile Grouped Devices."
• David Padua will receive $490,973 over three years for a project called "An Optimizing Compiler for Languages with Programmable Memory Models."

Researchers with the U of I's department of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering received four awards of more than $1 million and another award of almost $500,000. Researchers with the U of I's Beckman Institute, College of Law and department of library and information sciences also received awards.

The main goal of the ITR is to augment the nation's technology knowledge and strengthen the technology workforce. This goal came in direct response to a challenge from the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which called for more investments to maintain the United States leadership in computer research.

The NSF is requesting an additional $190 million in fiscal year 2001 to fund new ITR projects, although the actual appropriation is yet to be determined by Congress.

For a complete list of ITR awards and project abstracts, see http://www.itr.nsf.gov/.

For the PITAC report, see http://www.ccic.gov/.

 

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