This grant provides support for a new two-hour documentary, to be produced and broadcast for the PBS series NOVA, on the science of black holes.  Hosted by Columbia astrophysicist Janna Levin, the film will document how recent improvements in instrumentation have led to significant advances in our understanding of black holes and are shedding light on fundamental questions about the universe.  The show will include state-of-the-art animations as well as a free black hole app for mobile devices. Grant funds will provide production support for the documentary along with funds for app development, animation, and educational outreach campaigns targeting students, teachers, and the lay public.

Financial contracts range from stocks, options, and futures to loans, annuities, and swaps.  Each has its own rules governing who pays whom under what circumstances.  Understanding the obligations imposed by these real world contracts under various hypothetical future scenarios is essential to evaluating the risks posed by the financial system to the global macroeconomy.  What will happen if oil prices drop precipitously?  What will happen if Chinese growth slows far faster than expected?  What happens if there is another recession in the Eurozone? Project ACTUS (Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards), based at the Stevens Institute of Technology, seeks to answer these questions by simplifying the analysis of financial transactions.  In theory, every financial agreement can be modeled algorithmically in terms of just 30 basic paradigms called “contract types.”  Each contract type’s algorithm accepts as inputs both the parameters of the original agreement as well as information about the subsequent state of the world.  It then outputs the payments dictated by the contract to and from its counterparties.  In other words, the algorithm calculates “state dependent cash flows.”  Banks and consultants already have their own proprietary systems that accomplish this, of course, but ACTUS is developing a system that would be comprehensive, standardized, open source, and compatible across organizations.  It would allow the calculation of state dependent cash flows not just within a company, but across entire industries and economies, with potential applications in everything from risk management to regulatory reporting.  A 2012 planning grant from the Sloan Foundation supported ACTUS in the development and testing of the first six contract types.  Funds from this grant will expand the project, allowing the development and testing of six additional types, enough to cover most routine bank transactions.

This grant provides support for the production of a six-hour television series, to be produced by documentarian Ken Burns and broadcast on PBS, on the past, present, and future of cancer science. Based on Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller:  The Emperor of All Maladies. The Story of Cancer, the series will offer cinema-veritй style stories about patients and their caregivers and will delve into the latest scientific advances in cancer research, including how the sequencing of the human genome, has transformed  our understanding of the genetic, cellular, and molecular basis of cancer.  The series will focus on three specific types of cancer—leukemia, breast, and lung—in an effort to give a broad overview of the complexity of this disease.

Infectious disease expert Ian Lipkin, M.D., the John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University studied the microbial profiles of 133 rats in lower Manhattan and determined that they harbor multiple human pathogens.  This grant supports Lipkin as he expands this study to mice.  Lipkin will examine the microflora of 100 mice from each of 16 densely populated areas of New York City in order to determine what bacteria, fungi, and viruses are present in native NYC mice and whether the distribution of these microoganisms  differ by borough, season, or socioeconomic status of the surrounding human population.  The project has the potential to identify both known and novel pathogens in rodent vectors, provide insights into otherwise unexplained diseases by revealing links to infection with rodent-borne pathogens, and build support for rodent control.  The new knowledge will be shared through peer-reviewed publications and presentations at scientific and medical meetings.

One of the more surprising difficulties of working with big data—more than a few hundred gigabytes—is the sheer difficulty of moving it from place to place.  Though the price of cloud and local computing has dropped and the availability of bandwidth has increased, the standard protocols for transferring data over the Internet (http and ftp) simply start to break down at that scale.  Errors multiply, requiring laborious file integrity checking and repetitive restarting of transfer operations.  There is, as yet, no satisfactory solution to the simple yet thorny issue of moving meso? and larger scale data from one computer to another. Globus, a data management tool developed by a team at the University of Chicago’s Computation Institute, offers a promising solution to these problems, allowing the seamless transfer of large datasets with none of the drawbacks of existing methods.  The project is currently pivoting from support by grant funding to a sustainable nonprofit business model based on both individual and institutional subscriptions (and has already signed up six major universities as charter members).  However, it is facing a catch?22:  The team needs robust marketing and customer support capacity to build up a customer base, but without a customer base they will not have the funds to provide marketing and customer support.  Funds from this grant provide temporary bridge funding to the Globus platform, enabling the project to provide top quality service while it builds a customer base and moves towards independent sustainability.