Assessment and Evaluations of NSF OAC-Funded Program Impact on the Scientific Community

Nexight Group Llc, Silver Spring MD

Investigators

Abstract

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) is essential to the advancement and transformation of science and engineering. Over the last decade, the CI community has focused on developing secure, advanced, scalable, and global CI resources, tools, and services, creating an interoperable and collaborative CI ecosystem. In order to move forward strategically, it is critical to understand the impact that CI programs have had on the scientific research community. This award supports an effort to develop an understanding of this impact, by working with the Cyberinfrastructure community to understand and enhance the impact of programs such as NSF's Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) program and its predecessors. To this end, the PIs will gather relevant information, conduct a targeted survey, and prepare a report describing findings and mapping out the future directions of CI research. This work will provide new understanding of the impact of recent Data and Software Programs, through a systematic cross-cutting survey-based assessment. The assessment will seek to evaluate the impact of the activities funded under the Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs), Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2), and Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) programs. The approach is to (1) determine the scope of the activity and establish a framework for design of the survey (2) design and administer the survey and (3) analyze the results and synthesize the findings into a report. The outcomes will benefit the scientific research community broadly, by providing insights into the most effective methods of research support in Cyberinfrastrucutre, and broadening the impact of advanced Cyberinfrastructure research on the science and engineering domains. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.