Alexandra Medina-Borja

1. National Science Foundation
Partnerships for Innovation:
Building Innovation Capacity
PFI:BIC
--“Smart” Service Systems--
Alexandra Medina-Borja, Ph.D.
Program Director
Office of the Assistant Director
Directorate for Engineering
National Science Foundation

2. NSF Directorate for Engineering (ENG)
Emerging Frontiers in
Research and Innovation (EFRI)
Sohi Rastegar Office of the Assistant Director
Pramod Khargonekar, Assistant Director
Grace Wang, Deputy Assistant Director
Senior Advisor for
Nanotechnology
Mihail Roco
Chemical,
Bioengineering,
Environmental, and
Transport Systems
(CBET)
JoAnn Lighty
Civil, Mechanical,
and Manufacturing
Innovation (CMMI)
George Hazelrigg
(acting)
Electrical,
Communications,
and Cyber Systems
(ECCS)
Samir El-Ghazaly
Engineering
Education and
Centers (EEC)
Theresa Maldonado
Industrial
Innovation and
Partnerships
(IIP)
Cheryl Albus (acting)
Innovation Corps
Babu DasGupta
Program Director for
Evaluation & Assessment
Alexandra Medina-Borja
Program Director for
Strategic Operations
Cheryl Albus
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3. National Science Foundation
What is PFI: BIC?
• Partnerships for Innovation: Building Innovation Capacity
(PFI:BIC): SMART SERVICE SYSTEMS
– supports academe-industry partnerships,
– led by an interdisciplinary academic research
team collaborating with at least one industry partner
– to build technological, human, and service system
innovation capacity
– projects in the post-fundamental discovery space
but precede being on a clear path to
commercialization.
– understanding of human interaction with technology
to inform a human-centered service design
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4. National Science Foundation
Solicitation: NSF 14-610 Key Facts
• Letter of Intent (LOI) required: December 3, 2014
• Full proposal submission deadline: January 28, 2015
• Awards: up to $1,000,000/3-year duration
– Estimated: 10 awards
– Anticipated funding: $10,000,000
• Submission restrictions:
– One (1) submission opportunity/year
– Two (2) proposals per institution, each proposal, respectively,
pursuant to its own LOI .
– Principal Investigator (PI) who proposes
• Cannot be concurrently a PI on an active award from the NSF
PFI:BIC program
• PI cannot submit both to the PFI:BIC and to the PFI:AIR program for
funding with FY 2015 funds
Industrial Innovation & Partners with
hips
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5. National Science Foundation
Why Smart?
• Significant advances in, [and adaptations
of], sensing, actuating, and computational
and communication technologies and their
integration into service systems have the
potential for abundant societal and
economic benefits.
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Picture credit:http://www.augmentedrealitytrends.com

6. National Science Foundation
Service Systems: Socio-Technical
Configurations
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Human interaction with
technologies and with
physical and virtual
realities can produce and
deliver service(s) never
before imagined.

7. National Science Foundation
Smart Service System in the
NSF Context
• Human-centered.
– It involves users, recipients, beneficiaries, providers, and/or
decision makers utilizing the information and capability provided
by the service.
• Interactions between humans and physical/virtual
realities necessarily are integral to the “service”.
• These interfaces with humans can take many forms
– co-creation, interaction, response, needs assessment,
surveillance, etc.
• The interactions need to add value to humans;
– for an activity to become a service, a human or group of
humans need to ultimately benefit from the interactions
(directly or indirectly)
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8. National Science Foundation
What is a Smart Service System?
A system capable of
• learning;
• dynamic adaptation;
• decision making based upon data received,
transmitted, and/or processed;
• incorporates technologies for sensing, actuation,
coordination, communication, control, etc.; and
• may exhibit a sequence of features such as detection,
classification, and localization that lead to an outcome
occurring within a reasonable time.
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9. National Science Foundation
Actions of a Smart Service System
The system does so
through
• self-detection,
self-diagnosing,
self-correcting,
self-monitoring,
self-organizing,
self-replicating, or
self-controlled
functions.
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Credit: Georgia Tech College of Computing
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/features/go-go-social-robot

10. National Science Foundation
Range of Disciplines Required
In addition to those related to the technology or discovery:
(1) Systems Engineering or Engineering Design
– service system design and system integration issues.
(2) Computer Science/Information Technology
– considerations involving data transfer, communication and/or data
processing needed
(3) Human Factors/Behavioral Science/Cognitive
Engineering
– potential effects of human factors as they interact with the
technology proposed. These findings will have an impact on
ensuring that the design of the “smart” service system is human-
centered.
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11. National Science Foundation
Successful Research Teams
• A minimum of one (1) industry partner of any size is
required.
– U.S.-based and with commercial revenues
• Research tasks that demonstrate a highly collaborative
research plan
– with participation of the primary industrial partner(s)
with the academic researchers during the life of the
award.
– meaningful tasks for all co-Pis senior personnel
– research effort to integrate the technology into a real
service system with human factors considerations
• which in turn might spawn additional discoveries inspired by this
interaction of humans with the technology.
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12. National Science Foundation
Successful integration of technology into a smart
service system
(cont.)
• Examples of technology applied to service systems”
– smart healthcare, smart cities, on-demand transportation,
precision agriculture, smart infrastructure, smart buildings,
and other technologies enabling self-service and
customized service solutions.
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Credit: Torino Smart City http://www.torinosmartcity.it/il-future-internet-accelera-la-smart-city/

13. National Science Foundation
Partnership Requirements
• All industrial partners must have an explicit signed
commitment (stated in the partnership letter on
letterhead)
– Types of commitment: financial or in-kind
– If a partner qualifies as small business, and it also has a
subaward, commitment must be over and above subaward
compensation
• Other partnering—no specific requirements,
• it is likely that other partners (or additional expertise within
the academic team) might be needed;
− e.g., explicit expertise in “smart” service systems and/or to cover the
required range of disciplines in the three designated categories of the
project
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14. National Science Foundation
Cognizant Program Officers
• Sara B. Nerlove, ENG/IIP/PFI:BIC, Program Director,
telephone: (703) 292-7077, email: snerlove@nsf.gov
• Alexandra Medina-Borja, ENG/OAD, telephone: (703) 292-
7557, email: amedinab@nsf.gov
• Gurdip Singh, CISE, telephone: (703) 292-8950, email:
gsingh@nsf.gov
• Chris Paredis, ENG/CMMI, telephone: (703) 292-2241, email:
cparedis@nsf.gov
• Leon Esterowitz, ENG/CBET, telephone: (703) 292-7942, email:
lesterow@nsf.gov
• Alexander Leonessa, ENG/CBET, telephone: (703) 292-2678,
email: aleoness@nsf.gov
Industrial Innovation & 14

15. National Science Foundation
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