My November
Amstat News column,
Influencing Federal Research Funding Policy—White Papers?, explores the idea of the statistical science community raising their profile at NSF, the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and other agencies through white papers outlining the potential of a research direction, the research gaps, and recommendations going forward. The computer science community excels at this through the
Computing Community Consortium (CCC) visioning activities and whitepapers. The CCC is an NSF-funded project of the
Computing Research Association.
I hope you'll read that column and comment. In this blog entry, I share supplemental information starting with recent information from an OSTP representative, followed by possible opportunities from the CCC for statistical scientists, and ending with a mention of the elements of CCC whitepapers.
At the October meeting of the Joint Policy Board on Mathematics an OSTP representative affirmed that whitepapers inform and influence the considerations and discussions of research funding for upcoming budget proposals. For guidance on topics for such white papers, the representative said to look at the annual budget memo issued by the OSTP and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
In addition to affirming "resources are adequately allocated for agency-specific, mission-driven research," the
FY15 OMB-OSTP Budget Memo issued July 26, 2013 directs agencies to address nine multi-agency priorities for FY15: advanced manufacturing; clean energy; global climate change; R&D for informed policy-making and management; information technology; R&D for national-security missions; innovation in biology and neuroscience; science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education; and innovation and commercialization.
Statistical science could contribute to several of the FY15 OMB-OSTP priorities. As one example, the OSTP official suggested a whitepaper to the effect, Contributions of the Mathematical Sciences to the
BRAIN Initiative. Given the extensive work of statistical scientists for neuroscience (see, for example,
WANTED: Neuro-quants,) one could make this specific to statistical sciences but there are also advantages to a more general white paper from the mathematical sciences.
For those of you working extensively with computer scientists, or seeking to, we've also heard that the CCC calls for proposals, which appear on the CCC website and publicized through the
CCC blog, are open to statistical scientists as long as their is sufficient computer science content. As one example of a CCC call (with a December 1 deadline), CCC renewed a past call on September 6 titled, "
Creating Visions for Computing Research."
I think it is interesting this call for proposals, in addition to stipulating it "articulate new research visions," states the activity must also galvanize community interest in those visions, and mobilize support for those visions from the computing research community, government leaders, and funding agencies." On the last point, in a call ASA President had in October with CCC representatives, they stressed the importance of buy-in from the relevant folks at NSF (e.g., the DMS director) and OSTP to receiving such white-papers. Clearly the computer science community has this buy-in through the NSF CISE directorate's funding of the CCC and their strong connections to OSTP (as mentioned in my
November column.)
On the topic of galvanizing community support and mobilizing it, those are just one step of four in the CCC "visioning process" (as described in the afore-mentioned
call:
(1) nucleation,
(2) crystallization and broadening,
(3) program formulation,
(4) program realization and execution.
They have paragraph describing each of these steps.
To close out this blog entry, let me share the elements of
CCC whitepapers that were present in the three whitepapers I took a closer look at. Those elements are:
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Motivation of topic/background
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Statement of potential and research challenges needed to achieve that potential (e.g., from Robotics: “But there is a lot more that robots are capable of, and many more research challenges beyond navigation that will enable these new capabilities.”)
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Explanation of that potential
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Connection of topic to key national interest (e.g., health, energy, ...)
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State of the art: where the research stands
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The Way Forward: Recommendations on what research is needed (e.g., again from Robotics, “To accelerate the field, research in a number of key areas needs to be undertaken. It ranges from fundamental long‐term research to practical ready‐to‐deploy developments, as enumerated in that order below:”)
With the statistical science community seeking to a greater appreciation for its important contributions to science, white papers strike me as an option that the community should explore in greater depth. Can what the computer scientists do through the CCC be successfully scaled to the statistical scientists? We are a smaller community supported as a part (one eleventh) of a NSF division while computer scientists have much greater numbers and the support of an entire NSF directorate. Nonetheless, white papers seem like a promising approach for the statistical community worthy of further consideration.
See
other ASA Science Policy blog entries. For ASA science policy updates, follow @ASA_SciPol on Twitter. For more on ASA science policy, see
http://amstat.org/policy/.