New Ideas Go With the Flow
Jeffrey Mervis
National Science Foundation director Neal Lane has taken on few new research initiatives during his 3 years at the agency's helm (see main text). But he is now trying to get three new research programs included in the president's budget request, to be released in February.
The proposals are a classic Lanian blend of high-quality science and politically popular topics. NSF officials insist that the themes grow out of important work over the past several years in a number of related disciplines. But a White House official who requested anonymity is more skeptical: "I think it's a transparent attempt to get more money."
The first idea is a $20 million proposal to study Life in Extreme Environments. It hopes to capitalize on the excitement over last August's announcement that a martian meteorite found in Antarctica may contain fossilized evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet (Science, 16 August, pp. 864 and 924). Robert Corell, head of the geosciences directorate, says that the initiative includes ongoing studies of biological activity around deep-sea hot vents, the microbial diversity throughout the planet, and the evolution of the universe leading to life on Earth. Ernie Moniz, associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says he's excited about the idea and that "there's a feeling of a lot of market potential--grants and so on--to explore this subject."
The second idea, of similar size, is called Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI), a phrase that Vice President Gore has used in several speeches (Science, 12 April, p. 177). It draws on President Clinton's recently announced Internet II initiative to spend $100 million a year to bring more of society online, stimulate development of the next generation of the World Wide Web, and make what is already available more user-friendly (Science, 18 October, p. 335).
"The Web is a complex tangle of data and spaghetti, some deserving of our attention and some not fit for anybody," says Lane. "Out of this morass of data, how do you sort out knowledge? That capacity is intelligence." Moniz is more skeptical of KDI, however. "I've tried to understand what it entails," he says. "It focuses not on hardware but cognition, and the questions about the proper man-machine interface are interesting. But I'm not sure I know how to pursue the answers."
The third theme, Learning and Intelligent Systems, was actually begun last year by two directorates--engineering and computer science--but Lane hopes for additional money to expand it to the rest of the foundation. It's the brainchild of Joe Bordogna, former head of the engineering directorate and now acting deputy NSF director. It is hoped that the program will combine work in neuroscience and artificial intelligence with advances in robotics and automated systems for use in the classroom. NSF is offering $20 million this year to the best proposals, including real or virtual centers for collaborative research on learning technologies, and hopes to sustain the initiative in fiscal 1998.
