Research NewsletterIssue: ORN-2024-13

Reminder: Call For Proposals

NJIT Faculty Seed Grants (FSG): FY 2024-25

(Collaborative FSG: $10,000 and Single PI FSG: $7,500)

and

NJIT Collaborative Early Research Translation (CERT) Seed Grants: FY 2024-2025

($25,000 each)

Full Announcement Access

Proposal Submission Deadline:

FSG Proposals to Respective College/School Dean: April 3, 2024

CERT Seed Grant Proposals to Respective College/School Dean: April 3, 2024  

Project Funding Period: July 1, 2024 – June 30, 2025

NJIT Strategic Plan targets substantial increase in academic research and external funding with faculty and student professional development. With recent trends in external research funding favoring large collaborative research and innovation partnerships, NJIT is strategically focusing on creating seed funding opportunities for faculty and students to promote collaborative research, innovation and technology entrepreneurship with a complete spectrum of basic, applied and translational research addressing high impact scientific and societal needs.

Faculty Seed Grants

The purpose of the NJIT Faculty Seed Grant (FSG) initiative is to promote academic research in core and interdisciplinary areas by providing seed funding to obtain preliminary results or establish hypotheses for developing future grant proposals for submission to external funding agencies. The FSG initiative specifically seeks seed funding proposals from faculty to launch new initiatives in core, collaborative and interdisciplinary emerging areas aligned with NJIT strategic tactics to develop critical research mass. It is expected that the FSG funds will be used to promote on-campus collaborative research with faculty and students.

Collaborative Early Research Translation (CERT) Seed Grants

Recent trends in federal and private funding have significantly shifted towards large collaborative research and innovation partnerships-based grants for establishing regional and national research resources, hubs, centers, and institutes in key areas of high technology and economic impact. To compete for these large-scale grants, NJIT needs to enhance its capacity and capabilities for collaborative research synergies, specifically through applied and translational research and innovation as well as technology development and transfer activities with an entrepreneurial commercialization ecosystem. To accelerate NJIT’s trajectory towards increased collaborative research and innovation funding, a new strategic initiative to support Collaborative Early Research Translation (CERT) Seed Grants has been launched to invest in research clusters of high potential impact. These CERT seed grants will initiate early translation of research and innovation, working collaboratively with an external partner, towards developing proof-of-feasibility and potential intellectual property to build foundation to submit competitive proposals for external research translation acceleration funding opportunities, such as NSF ART (Accelerating Research Translation), NSF PFI (Partnerships for Innovation) and NIH Biomedical Research Partnerships, or internal NJIT TITA (Technology Innovation Translation Acceleration) seed grants for further advancement in translational research and market validation.

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Issuance of the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide

NSF has published a revised version of the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide (NSF 24-006). Overall, the Guide has been updated to align with the revisions to NSF’s Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) (NSF 24-1). A by-chapter summary of changes is provided at the beginning of the document.

The Guide will be effective for applications submitted (via Grants.gov) or due, on or after May 20, 2024.

NSF: Piloting Departmental-level Systemic Change for Equity; Global Centers; Computer Science for All; Improving Artificial Intelligence, Formal Methods, and Mathematical Reasoning; Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Computing in Undergraduate Education; Ideas Lab: Advancing Cell-Free Systems Toward Increased Range of Use-Inspired Applications

NIH: NIH Director’s Transformative Research Awards (R01); Support for Research Excellence (SuRE) Award (R16)

EPA: Advancing Sustainable Chemistry

Department of Energy: FY 2024 Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR); Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) Advanced Energy Manufacturing and Recycling Grant Program; STEWARDSHIP SCIENCE ACADEMIC ALLIANCES PROGRAM

NASA: ROSES 2024: A.7 Biodiversity and Ecological Conservation; ROSES - 2024: Early Career Investigator Program and Other Solicitations

National Endowment of Humanities: Cultural and Community Resilience; Research and Development

Generative AI could leave users holding the bag for copyright violations: Generative artificial intelligence has been hailed for its potential to transform creativity, and especially by lowering the barriers to content creation. While the creative potential of generative AI tools has often been highlighted, the popularity of these tools poses questions about intellectual property and copyright protection. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are powered by foundational AI models, or AI models trained on vast quantities of data. Generative AI is trained on billions of pieces of data taken from text or images scraped from the internet. Generative AI uses very powerful machine learning methods such as deep learning and transfer learning on such vast repositories of data to understand the relationships among those pieces of data – for instance, which words tend to follow other words. This allows generative AI to perform a broad range of tasks that can mimic cognition and reasoning. One problem is that output from an AI tool can be very similar to copyright-protected materials. Leaving aside how generative models are trained, the challenge that widespread use of generative AI poses is how individuals and companies could be held liable when generative AI outputs infringe on copyright protections. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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UN approves resolution on AI safety and advancement: The United Nations voted to adopt a historic resolution on how to safely manage and mitigate the risks posed by artificial intelligence technologies on Thursday morning, part of a monthslong negotiation effort spearheaded by the U.S. government to establish an international consensus on AI usage. Biden administration officials confirmed on a Wednesday press call that the resolution, titled “Seizing the opportunities of Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Systems for Sustainable Development,” mirrors President Joe Biden’s October 2023 executive order on AI, which prioritizes a human-centric and rights-driven approach to AI software development and deployment. It establishes a set of global norms that outline how to best adopt AI while protecting human rights.  “This resolution encourages guardrails to keep people safe,” a senior administration official said on the call. “It encourages protecting personal data, strengthening privacy policies and monitoring AI for risks, and it encourages compliance with international human rights laws.”

Informing the resolution are over 120 countries offering “thousands” of suggestions, according to the official. So far, about 97 nations have agreed to cosponsor the resolution, including China, one of the U.S.’s chief geopolitical rivals. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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Biden's $1.67 trillion budget boosts tech, AI: President Joe Biden’s proposed fiscal year 2025 federal budget would direct significant funding toward agencies’ adoption of artificial intelligence technologies, while also boosting spending to modernize outdated government services and enhance cybersecurity practices as part of a broader effort to promote U.S. leadership and innovation.  In a press call on Monday, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young said the request for $1.67 trillion in discretionary spending for fiscal year 2025 builds on the vision laid out in Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address by focusing, in part, on “expanding and protecting access to health care, supporting America's workforce and boosting manufacturing, confronting the climate crisis while spurring clean energy innovation, providing national paid leave, advancing cancer research, making our communities safer and more.”  The budget includes $850 billion in defense spending, up $34 billion from 2023 enacted levels. Non-defense discretionary funding is $770 billion. If mandatory spending items like Medicare, Social Security and other obligations are lumped in, the fiscal year budget totals $7.3 trillion. The budget includes significant investments to advance Biden’s October 2023 executive order on the safe and secure development of AI, which officials framed as a key component of efforts to ensure continued U.S. tech leadership. The funding proposal also seeks to invest $20 billion “across major research agencies” to drive further innovative efforts spurred on by passage of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, an increase of $1.2 billion from allocated 2023 funding. More information is posted on the NextGov website.