This grant funds research by Michael S. Waring, Associate Professor of Architectural and Environmental Engineering and Peter DeCarlo, Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering and Chemistry at Drexel University, that will examine the chemical and physical transformations occurring within a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. Waring and DeCarlo’s work will focus on aerosol and gas-phase transformations, exploring how aerosol processing, composition, and component-based filtration are influenced by extreme and abrupt changes in temperature, relative humidity, and aerosol concentration as air is thermally conditioned and filtered. Utilizing a controllable HVAC system in a Drexel office building, Waring and DeCarlo will make seasonal measurements of the chemical composition of aerosols and trace gases at four locations in the HVAC system—outdoor, mixed, supply, and return air—to isolate the impact of HVAC system aerosol and gas composition. Aerosol composition will be measured using a high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometer with other instruments capturing trace concentrations of CO, CO2, H2O, O3, NO, NO2. Grant funds also support Waring and DeCarlo’s continued analysis of data collected during 2018’s Sloan-funded HOMEChem field project.

This grant supports a collaboration between Paul Wennberg, R. Stanton Avery Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Science and Engineering, California Institute of Technology, and Henrik Kjaergaard, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, to examine the role of autoxidation (a series of unimolecular processes that rapidly yield oxidized compounds) in indoor environments. Kjaergaard will use computational chemistry methods to diagnose the autoxidation pathways and estimate the rate coefficients for the organic peroxy radical chemistry initiated by the reactions of ozone and the hydroxyl radical with chemicals typically found indoors, especially a suite of terpenes. Complementing this approach, Wennberg will study terpene chemistry in the laboratory to evaluate the computational work and provide guidance for how to extend the calculations to more organic substrates. The pair will publish a suite of mechanistic schemes that describe the chemistry in peer-reviewed manuscripts, present their findings at conferences and meetings, and integrate their work into existing indoor chemical models.

Progress in understanding the relationship between basic research and economic growth requires high-quality data on patents and patenting. Barriers to acquiring, cleaning, and sharing such data remain a significant hurdle to conducting empirical research on a wide range of topics, including the return on investment to basic science investment, the productivity of scientific teams, regulatory impacts on patenting and innovation, and much more. This grant provides funding to the “Innovation Information Initiative,” or I3, a collaborative project to build a linked series of state-of-the-art, open databases that make high-quality patent data easily available to researchers. Led by Yarn Labs, a not-for-profit spin off of the MIT Media Lab, the project will clean and document existing sources of patent data; create new data products that include a catalog of links between patents and products; disambiguate authors, institutions, funders, and titles; and compile patent citations to the scholarly literature. To facilitate use of these new resources, the team will develop user-friendly interfaces and a series of models, algorithms, and other analysis tools. Outreach plans include organizing an annual research meeting alongside the NBER Summer Institute; an annual meeting to coordinate technical matters; and fellowships for Ph.D. students interested in the rigorous study of patenting.

The Summer Institute run by the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) is an annual gathering of empirical economists that takes place over three weeks of July in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is widely recognized as the most significant meeting of its kind. In 2018, more than 2,200 economists from 427 institutions participated in at least one of over 50 workshops on a wide range of economic topics, from behavioral macroeconomics to innovation and digitization. Indeed, organizers of the Summer Institute work hard to attract the highest quality research and researchers. The selection process is highly competitive. In 2018, for example, over 5,800 submissions were made and fewer than 10% were accepted. The structure and range of activities taking place at the Summer Institute make it a unique venue for cross-fertilization of ideas. Workshops and lunches are deliberately scheduled to overlap in order to increase the likelihood of interaction between researchers interested in related fields. Participant surveys show high satisfaction with the quality and breadth of the presentations, and appreciation for the opportunity to meet other researchers and initiate new collaborations. This grant provides operating support to NBER to continue to host the Institute for three years.

Administrative data can enable a wide variety of new and more accurate statistical work by researchers in academia, government, business, and other organizations. In the United States, no statistical findings are more fundamental for economists and social scientists than those produced by the Census Bureau, including the Decennial estimates of population counts and characteristics. But declining response rates to any kind of survey, not to mention concerns about interference and privacy, have raised serious apprehensions about the accuracy of the upcoming count in 2020. This is an equity issue in addition to a statistical one, since concern is particularly acute about miscounts of historically underrepresented or underprivileged groups.   Funds from this grant support a project by the Massive Data Institute (MDI) at Georgetown to use state-level administrative data to bolster the Decennial Census. MDI will work with various states to identify government sources of administrative data that describe people from across geographic areas and subpopulations; determine how to access the data legally and securely; develop tools to clean and standardize that data; and provide documentation, training, and protocols for use by other states.

An important question in the social sciences is how researchers can responsibly study large datasets containing confidential information about individuals, and how organizations can safely share such data while preserving the privacy of their users. Every query answered inevitably leaks some privacy. The only conceptual framework for specifying, measuring, and controlling such leakage is known as “differential privacy.” Imagine analysts who use a query mechanism to interrogate a dataset held by a trusted curator. An example of a differentially private mechanism would be one that returns an answer after adding a small amount of random noise drawn from a carefully selected distribution. That noise provably limits whether the analyst can even find out whether any given person is in the dataset, let alone anything else about that individual. Sloan has been an early funder of the development and application of this approach. This grant funds efforts by Salil Vadhan of the Harvard Privacy Tools Project to create a library of industrial-strength, open source differential privacy software called OpenDP. Like other open source development communities, OpenDP participants will cooperate to develop trusted, robust, and scalable tools that are easily accessible and adoptable in a wide variety of settings. Vadhan will convene a group of experts and users to guide the project’s overall architecture, features, progress, and sustainability planning.

What constitutes progress in empirical social science research? It is easy to talk about “new knowledge,” but hard to measure it. To evaluate what constitutes new knowledge requires measuring not only what scholars think of an experiment after it is performed, but also what they forecast about the results in advance. This grant supports an initiative by a team led by Stefano DellaVigna at the University of California, Berkeley to build, test, and study an online platform for collecting and cataloguing forecasts and prior beliefs about the results of social science experiments. DellaVigna and his team will write up summaries of intended experiments that forecasters can quickly read and absorb, and will find interesting. Those experts would, in turn, use the developed platform to enter their best estimates about how the experiment will turn out, including their predictions of the effect sizes. These answers can then be compared to the actual results of the experiments. The platform DellaVigna and his collaborators will develop has the potential to allow researchers to capture forecasts, control publication bias, improve the transparency and reproducibility of research designs, and advance the use of Bayesian methods more generally by helping quantify prior probabilities.

This grant supports an effort by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to increase scholarly attention to how market and government forces impact innovation in the energy sector. NBER will hold two open calls for papers, one on what can be learned from recent successes and failures in energy technology, and a second on the forces that contribute to breakthroughs in energy technology innovation. Fourteen projects in total will be selected for support from those responding to the calls and NBER will organize a research conference for each call where supported papers will be presented and discussed. Finally, NBER will hold a third conference aimed at sharing research findings with energy decision-makers and other interested stakeholders.

Temoa (Tools for Energy Model Optimization and Analysis) is a modern, open source software platform for modeling energy systems. Developed by Joe DeCarolis at North Carolina State University, Temoa is a model modeling framework. It’s open source, well-documented, small enough to run without access to huge computing resources, and accompanied by guides and tutorials that make its features accessible for new and experienced modelers alike. Funds from this grant support a project led by DeCarolis and his collaborator, Paulina Jaramillo of Carnegie Mellon University, to utilize Temoa to create an Open Energy Outlook report for the United States. The report will lay out several scenarios for how the U.S. energy system might evolve over the coming decades, including detailed consideration of how sector specific developments in buildings, electricity, fuels, heavy industry, policy and economics, and transportation might contribute to that evolution. The report promises to be an important complement to the Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook and other similar modeling efforts. Grant funds will support two iterations of the Open Energy Outlook Report, intra-team meetings and workshops, and development of the Temoa model to support the new analysis.

Regional transmission organizations (RTOs) and independent system operators (ISOs) are key parts of the U.S. electricity system. Although RTOs and ISOs operate wholesale electricity markets that serve about two-thirds of U.S. electricity customers, there is very little research comparing how these institutions work, what influence stakeholder groups have on their behavior, or which aspects of these institutions might be portable to similar organizations. This grant funds a collaborative project, co-led by Kate Konschnik, who directs the Climate and Energy program at Duke University and associate professor Seth Blumsack of Pennsylvania State University, to undertake a set of studies to explore these and related questions associated with the governance, structure, and operation of RTOs and ISOs. Konschnik and Blumsack have assembled a multidisciplinary group of researchers from economics, law, public policy, energy systems operations, and engineering to contribute to this effort. The project will produce approximately 10 academic research articles across multiple fields, in addition to associated policy briefs or white papers for broad dissemination to a wide range of stakeholders. Grant funding will cover graduate student participation, direct support for research expenses, and bringing participating scholars together to ensure project coordination.