Funds from this grant support efforts to integrate the various diverse research projects and initiatives of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) through the development of new numerical models and visualizations.  Geologist Elizabeth Cottrell of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History will lead a multidisciplinary team of researchers, technologists, and representatives from each of the DCO’s four scientific directorates to spearhead the collaborative development of new models and visualizations that incorporate the data collected and theoretical insights developed by DCO researchers in the field.  Contrell and her team will convene a workshop of DCO stakeholders to set modeling and visualization priorities, create an introductory visualization of the history of terrestrial vulcanism, and oversee the distribution of a small number of seed grants to stimulate modeling work on projects identified as high priority.  The project promises several benefits, including forcing consistency upon diverse DCO research efforts, revealing gaps in measurement and functional understanding within the DCO community, and spurring new insights and projections. 

This grant funds work by Alice Silverberg of the University of California, Irvine to bring together mathematicians, cryptologists, and computer scientists in a concerted research effort to build on recent breakthroughs in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).  FHE is a promising new encryption technique that allows accurate computation on encrypted data, allowing third parties to perform calculations on datasets without the need to decrypt them first. Recent mathematical breakthroughs in FHE have shown it to be theoretically possible, though extant techniques are too slow and unwieldy for practical use.  Silverstein’s project will bring attention and intellectual firepower to the issue, in the hopes of eventually crafting more feasible FHE approaches, with consequent benefits for the conduct of privacy-preserving research by allowing scientific analysis of private, proprietary, and otherwise sensitive data.

When researchers share data, their empirical results become more reproducible and more reusable. This, in turn, can accelerate progress while enhancing accountability and transparency. This grant supports efforts by Gary King and Mercи Crosas of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University to facilitate data sharing through continued development of the Dataverse Network (DVN), a leading Harvard-based data repository.  Working with scientists, technologists, and academic publishers, King and Crosas have launched an ambitious project to help academic journals make data submission a fully integrated part of the paper submission process, using the Dataverse infrastructure to store and manipulate data submitted by authors.  Grant funds will support several activities aimed at expanding and improving Dataverse, including convening workshops and conferences with stakeholders to develop uniform standards and protocols, crafting an application programming interface, and developing several “data widgets” that allow real-time manipulation of data uploaded to the system.

Funds from this grant support a project led by Steven Hamburg of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to spearhead the study of two critical topics related to shale oil and gas exploration.  The first is the characterization and treatment of wastewater (“flowback” fluids) resulting from shale gas and shale oil exploration.  The second is the examination of methane emissions from natural gas end users in the industrial, commercial, residential, and transportation sectors.  EDF will organize a several emerging issue workshops that will engage leading researchers in the design of a detailed set of scientific research projects related to wastewater issues and methane emissions from end users resulting in a detailed set of research questions, sampling strategies, project management plans, collaboration agreements, and deliverable expectations.  Additional grant funds will support a set of quick turnaround, small-scale, proof of concept projects to rapidly test the suggested technologies and methodologies that emerge from the workshops.

The meaning of mathematical formulae depends on how they are represented and displayed. Mathematical symbols have to be arranged and ordered precisely, lest the meaning of formulae change completely. A poorly placed line break can render a mathematical expression incoherent.  The rise of the internet has made this problem acute.  Major browsers developed by Apple, Google, and Microsoft do not support mathematical content.  As more and more content is accessed on screens, tablet computers, and smart phones, mathematicians need a tool that can rearrange mathematical expressions dynamically without distortion of meaning.  This grant funds efforts by a consortium led by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) to “semantically enrich” MathML, a markup language used by the popular, open source MathJax platform.  The AMS team aims to further develop the MathML language, allowing it to encode information about the meaning of mathematical expressions and how to display them.  If successful, the project would eventually allow browsers to treat mathematical expressions not as uninterpreted strings of symbols, but as contentful expressions whose meaning must be preserved across changes in display.

The Clean Air Act (CAA) serves as one of the main statutes under which the Environmental Protection Agency oversees a broad range of challenges, such as mobile source emissions, air quality, acid rain, and hazardous air pollution.  Better understanding how the CAA can be applied in new contexts is increasingly important given how central this statute has become to the implementation of greenhouse gas control strategies in the United States. This grant provides funds to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to undertake an in-depth, two-year study looking at the CAA as a model for creating “durable yet flexible” energy and environmental policy.  The first year of the project will involve interdisciplinary research on five different case study applications of the CAA.  The purpose will be to identify and confirm the individual elements that have made the CAA both durable and adaptable since enacted into law nearly 45 years ago.  The second year of the proposed project will then compare these analyses to tease out common “design characteristics” emerging from the case studies.  The research will culminate in a capstone workshop and a companion public event where the results would be widely shared.  In addition, the researchers will produce a set of working papers and articles in peer-reviewed energy and environment journals and make several presentations on their findings to key stakeholders.

This grant provides continued support to George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for the continued development of PressForward, a software platform that facilitates the creation of “overlay journals,” curated collections of scholarly materials whose contents are drawn not from original submissions, but from existing academic sources.  PressForward journals have the ability to draw material not only from existing online journals, but from the rich landscape of reputable working paper repositories like SSRN, rapid publication venues like PLoSONE, preprint repositories like arXiv, and the untidy world of blogs, posters, and other gray literature. Previous Sloan grants supported the initial development of PressForward and its deployment to a handful of pilot sites.  Funds from this grant support the expansion of the platform, the hiring of an outreach specialist to give presentations and handle online engagement, increased help desk capacity, a summer institute to train potential users, and additional software development as determined through user needs.

Developed by the California Digital Library (CDL), which serves the entire University of California system, the Data Management Plan (DMP) tool is an open source software platform that allows UC researchers to create and implement data management plans, which are an increasingly ubiquitous requirement of government and private funding for scientific research.  The existence of such platforms reduces the barriers to data sharing, allowing scientists to make their data permanently available in accordance with funder requirements without having to invest significant time, effort, or other resources in the process.  Funds from this grant will allow the CDL, which operates out of the Office of the President, to launch and implement a redesign of the user interface of the Data Management Plan tool.  Using detailed user feedback that is the norm in much for-profit software development, the CDL team will redesign its primary interface using detailed user-experience testing, letting the needs and competencies of actual users drive how the interface works. The result will be a lightweight open source software application that would be accessible initially to the thousands of scientists and researchers employed throughout the University of California system, but which will be generalized enough that it could, in principle, sit in-between users and any data repository.