I looked at the NSF-OCI solicitation. Maybe I'm not seeing what you think
is a target.
I found this
- Enable academic departments, disciplinary and cross-disciplinary
units, or multi-organization consortia to renovate research facilities
through the addition or augmentation of cyberinfrastructure, other than
general-purpose computing systems or data storage systems, to create
environments that enhance research and integrate research with education.
-
If so, then the argument should be made as to how you are augmenting
cyberinfrastructure.
I suppose the example below suggests that you can write programs to
do something that would be more time-consuming without computers.
I would not n
There are lots of thing that fall into this category. I don't know what
NSF is aiming for as "cyberinfrastructure".
For example, I could propose a project that did the following:
(a) made a list of all humans identifiable on the internet.
(b) as far as possible, determined their date of birth day/month or
day/month/year
(c) allowed research that would otherwise be quite difficult like
1. What percentage of such people were born in November?
2. What is the distribution of ages of people ...
3. What percentage of people were born on Friday
etc.
Now is this interesting fundable cyberinfrastructure?
(I don't know. Depends on the reviewers I guess).
And whether, say
http://www.emba.uvm.edu/~jdinitz/contents.1.html
or just google can do the job you propose needs new programs.
And whether the new programs are self sustaining or would
be stale immediately after funding stopped.
Just some thoughts. I have not been on an NSF review panel for
at least 10 years.
RJF
On Friday, October 31, 2014 3:51:13 AM UTC-7, Nathann Cohen wrote:
>
> Yo !
>
> Does Math directorate pay for programmers to write open-source versions
>> of commercial software?
>>
>
> <flame>
> Of course not. It is just that when commercial softwares fail to do the
> job, we have to do it in their stead. And we cannot seriously expect them
> to implement what we need for our research, very often that code is only
> interesting/useful to researchers.
>
To the extent that code you write is only interested in researchers in a
narrow area (say in some corner of pure mathematics), the proposal
is less interesting than one with broad impact.
Just saying.
> </flame>
>
> Or are these topics designating novel algorithms and data structures?
>>
>
> Well. For instance you will find this feature quite useless to
> non-researchers:
>
> sage: print designs.orthogonal_arrays.explain_construction(10,814)
> Construction 3.4 with n=17,m=47,r=6,s=9 from:
> Julian R. Abel, Nicholas Cavenagh
> Concerning eight mutually orthogonal latin squares,
> Vol. 15, n.3, pp. 255-261,
> Journal of Combinatorial Designs, 2007
> sage: print designs.orthogonal_arrays.explain_construction(22,792)
> Lemma 4.1 with n=25,m=28 from:
> Charles J.Colbourn, Jeffrey H. Dinitz, Mieczyslaw Wojtas,
> Thwarts in transversal designs,
> Designs, Codes and Cryptography 5, no. 3 (1995): 189-197.
>
> It tells you in which paper was proved the existence of an orthogonal
> array OA(10,814) and OA(22,792).
>
> If not for Sage, it is just impossible to find out this kind of
> information (*). That's not really computer science, that's more archeology
> than mathematics, but it can be useful to (some) mathematicians.
>
Yes, some. Is it the best use of NSF's limited budget? Will it provide
leverage in solving the problems of society? (I have no idea how
broad your search stuff is. Is it just orthogonal arrays, experimental
design ??
All of mathematics??)
Good luck
>
> Nathann
>
> (*) It is not just a database. We implement different recursive
> constructions from different papers, Sage computes all possible
> combinations of them and find out which leads to the result. I dare you to
> do it with a paper and pen :-P
>
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