Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence

## Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI)

Dear Colleagues:

NSF has announced a new initiative called "Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence" (KDI) that may be of interest to many in the ocean community. Rather than make suggestions on how you might take advantage of this oppportunity, I simply want to draw it to your attention anticipating that it will generate either group or individual interest. Please pass the word along to other colleagues who might be interested. If you have questions about KDI, first read the KDI web page at http://www.nsf.gov/kdi ; further inquiries should be emailed to kdi@nsf.gov.

Don Rice

The recent explosive growth in computer power and connectivity is reshaping relationships among people and organizations, and transforming the processes of discovery, learning, and communication. As a result of the technological advances we have unprecedented opportunities for providing rapid and efficient access to enormous amounts of knowledge and information; for studying vastly more complex systems than was hitherto possible; and for advancing in fundamental ways our understanding of learning and intelligent behavior in living and engineered systems. NSF's Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) theme is a Foundation-wide effort to promote the realization of these opportunities.

### Three Foci for FY 1998: KN, LIS, and NCC

To achieve the aims of KDI, proposals are solicited from individuals or groups for research that is inherently multidisciplinary or that, while lying within a single discipline, has clear impact on at least one other discipline. In FY 1998, KDI will have three foci: Knowledge Networking (KN); Learning and Intelligent Systems (LIS); and New Computational Challenges (NCC).

Knowledge Networking (KN) focuses on the integration of knowledge from different sources and domains across space and time. The goal of KN research is to achieve new levels of knowledge integration, information flow, and interactivity among people, organizations, and communities, and to deepen our understanding of the ethical, legal, and social implications of knowledge networking.

Learning and Intelligent Systems (LIS), an ongoing program, seeks to stimulate multidisciplinary research that will unify experimentally and theoretically derived concepts related to learning and intelligent systems, and that will promote the use and development of information technologies in learning and discovery across a wide variety of fields. LIS emphasizes research that advances basic understanding of learning and intelligence in natural and artificial systems, as well as research that supports the development of tools and environments to test and apply this understanding in real situations.

New Computational Challenges (NCC) focuses on research and tools needed to discover, model, simulate, analyze, display, or understand complicated phenomena, to control resources and deal with massive volumes of data in real time, and to predict the behavior of complex systems. These aims will require major advances in hardware and software to handle complexity, representation, and scale, to enable distributed collaboration, and to facilitate real-time interactions and control.

### The KDI Competition

A KDI proposal solicitation has just been released; the full text is posted on the KDI web page at http://www.nsf.gov/kdi. Letters of intent are due April 1, 1998, and the deadline for full proposals is May 8. Awards will be made in the fall. Approximately $50 million is available for funding proposals submitted to this competition.

Proposals are solicited for any amount up to $1.0 million per year for up to three years. We expect to make grants at a wide variety of amounts and durations. In exceptional cases, awards for up to five years may be considered if the justification and promise are compelling.

A second KDI competition will be held in FY 1999, subject to availability of funds. An updated solicitation, which may include revised research emphases, will be released in advance of this competition.

For more details please see the solicitation.