Among the provisions contained in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a requirement that regulators figure out which institutions contribute the most to systemic risk so that these companies can be supervised more closely. Making such a determination requires the creation of a sophisticated, empirically-tested, theoretically-informed model of how firm qualities contribute to systemic risk. Funds from this grant support the ongoing efforts of NYU Stern School Business Professor and Nobel Laureate Rob Engle to develop such a model, allowing a comprehensive ranking of firms that pose the most danger to the global economy. Engle's work subjects firms to a form of stress test, modeling how easily firms could meet regulatory requirements in the event of a sudden drop in asset prices similar to the one that roiled markets in the fall of 2008. Grant funds will allow for the refinement of Professor Engle's model, and for expansion of his rankings to include not just U.S. firms, but international firms as well.

Funds from this grant support a project by Resources for the Future (RFF) to assess the risks associated with increased shale gas development in the United States as viewed by both experts and the public. Primary focus will be on water scarcity and water, air, and soil quality issues associated with surface operations at well sites, vertical well drilling, horizontal drilling, deep hydraulic fracturing, and wastewater disposal. Expert views will be assembled from existing literature, recent government analyses, and interviews with selected experts. Public views will be determined by means of interviews with up to 100 people, four focus groups, and a survey of 1,500 randomly selected adults that will focus on public willingness to pay to reduce risks from shale gas development. Participants in the interviews, focus groups, and surveys will be drawn from residents in the western region of the United States, including Texas, where oil and gas production has a long history, and from the six-state eastern region of the Marcellus shale formation, where oil and gas production had not occurred for many years until recently and where shale gas production could be extensive in the near future. Subsequent to this research, RFF will identify, describe, and analyze the drivers of environmental risks associated with shale gas production and the policy levers potentially available to reduce these risks. RFF will describe and analyze current and prospective regulation and legislation at the national, river basin commission, and state levels, with some attention to the local level. Finally, RFF will put all of this together to develop recommendations for improvements in regulation and legislation.

In a poll conducted by Science in 2011, scientists across disciplines were asked, "Where do you archive most of the data generated in your lab or for your research?" More than 50% responded "in our lab." While fine for short-term research needs, this "data under the desk" scenario poses real risks for the long-term utility and reproducibility of research. One way of improving this situation and getting more data under safer cover is to develop data management solutions that directly address the immediate needs of researchers while allowing the delegation of data curation functions like preservation and archiving. This grant supports a focused, iterative development process by DuraSpace to design, build, and release such a system.

Access to some datasets is justifiably restricted for legal, ethical, or business reasons. The existence of such datasets presents an opportunity for the smart application of technology that permits aggregate statistical or computational research on the data without violating the constraints that prevent full access. This grant to researcher Beth Plale at Indiana University, supports a collaborative project with the Hathi Trust, holder of over 8.5 million digitized print works, to address the immense technical and theoretical issues involved in designing digital methods for mining data from in-copyright materials that respect current legal restrictions governing access to such works. Plale's team will develop a secure computing environment that will enable researchers to bring their own algorithms and tools to bear on Hathi's full?text digitized corpus, while at the same time limiting the ability of that software (or researchers) to access the work in a way that runs afoul of copyright law.

Raw data needs preparation to be useful for research. In some cases, what is needed is cleanup and normalization; in others, tagging or categorizing dataset elements. Depending on the domain and kind of data, computers can do much of the necessary work, but some tasks, due to fuzziness or complexity in the data, are currently beyond the bounds of computation. Much data prep requires human eyes, human minds, human judgment, and human labor, a daunting demand when the size of many modern scientific datasets is measured in terabytes. The Zooniverse project, an international effort initially based at Oxford University and now housed primarily at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, offers a straightforward solution to this problem: divide the work into very granular tasks, gather a large crowd of science enthusiasts, and let them loose on the data. "Galaxy Zoo," the first Zooniverse initiative, asked participants to view images of galaxies collected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and to categorize their shapes, successfully engaging 130,000 participants who performed over 100 million distinct classifications. Subsequent projects have expanded the Zooniverse strategy into other scientific domains, asking volunteers, in one case, to help reconstruct historical climate data by entering records from the digitized images of ship logbooks. Funds from this two-year grant will support the extension of the Zooniverse platform into new mechanics beyond image classification (for example, sound classification of whale songs, or tagging of species from video feeds), outreach efforts to identify scientific datasets that might be usefully improved through tapping Zooniverse volunteers, and activities to engage the large and growing community of the citizen scientists that participate in Zooniverse projects.

Geologists have dreamed of drilling through the Mohorovi?i? discontinuity between Earth's crust and mantle for more than 50 years. Actual rock from this so-called "Mohole" and observations taken along the way could shed light on many of the most fundamental questions about Earth's history and dynamics that more indirect sampling methods, mainly acoustic, have not been able to answer. The acoustic methods, such as "3-D Seismic" are effective means for creating synoptic images (similar to remote sensing by satellite), but just as a satellite cannot sequence the DNA in a plant or animal spied on Earth's surface, so acoustic and other methods cannot specify mineral composition and other crucial aspects of Earth's interior. Samples taken from the Mohold could prove valuable for defining the limits of life in the deepest part of the crust as well as for understanding mantle-crust interactions and other geological questions The prospect of drilling a hole to earth's mantle, however, is daunting. The most likely site, in the Pacific, would require drilling a hole the depth of 14 Empire State Buildings in 10 Empire State Buildings of water. While continental drillers have drilled this deep and ocean drillers have operated in such deep water, the project would involve integrating the two traditions in an unprecedented way. Risks include safety, environment, and finance (One study estimated the total cost of successfully completing the Mohole could exceed $500 million). Funds from this grant will support efforts by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program to begin the planning and infrastructure development necessary for successfully drilling a borehole to earth's mantle.

This grant to Ohio State University will provide two years of funding for the creation and operation of the Deep Energy directorate of the Deep Carbon Observatory. The third of four directorates that make up the observatory, the Deep Energy directorate will tap an international network of researchers to address one of the most controversial and momentous issues in earth sciences: how to distinguish hydrocarbons, including natural gas and petroleum, which originate from biological materials ("fossil fuels") from those that do not. The Deep Energy team's research agenda aims to develop a fundamental understanding of environments and processes that regulate chemical, mineralogical, and isotopic signatures that could be used to unambiguously differentiate abiogenic from biogenic sources of hydrocarbons. Fifteen scientists from seven countries spanning diverse views form the core team, which is coordinated by a pair of dynamic young researchers, David Cole (Ohio State) and Chris Ballentine (Manchester University, U.K.).

As countries around the world consider building their first nuclear power plant, they must inevitably consider the question of what will happen to the used or "spent" nuclear fuel that will come out of these reactors. An attractive option, especially for countries that are small or that will have only a small number of nuclear power plants, is to work cooperatively with other countries to create a regional spent fuel and high-level nuclear waste repository, thus sharing among a set of partner countries the high costs of such a facility. Since 2009, the Foundation has provided funds to the Arius Association to enable them to promote the regional repository approach in the Arabian Gulf-Middle East region and in South East Asia. Several countries in each of these regions are committed to launching nuclear power programs. Funds from this grant will provide support to Arias for the continuation of these efforts. During that time they will help plan and provide the intellectual backing for two regional meetings. The United Arab Emirates will host an Arabian Gulf-Middle East meeting; and the International Atomic Energy Agency will host a South East Asia meeting. By the end of the two-year grant period, Arius aims to facilitate the creation of multinational working groups considering the desirability and feasibility of creating regional repositories in each of these regions. Working with partner countries and the IAEA, Arius will draft the technical and legal documents needed to make this possible. They will also publish at least one article in a major international magazine that explains and publicizes their work on regional repositories and showcases their progress.

The shift to digitally-mediated forms of scholarship has been characterized by a substantial growth in channels for and diversity of scholarly work. We see this in the flourishing of content in preprint servers and rapid- publication channels like arXiv, PLoS ONE, and the Social Science Research Network alongside unconventional forms of scholarly communication like research blogs and personal websites, all of which enable scholars to put their work out for broad access. Part of the Foundation's emerging strategy to ease this transition is to support the development of new models of filtering and curating online scholarly materials. This three-year grant supports the work of Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (CHNM) in the development of a software platform that will enable professional societies and interdisciplinary networks of scholars to collectively organize and review relevant resources. Cohen and Scheinfeldt will undertake a detailed study of various models for aggregating scholarly content, as well as a broad landscape survey of new and changing techniques for managing content on the "open web." In addition to contributing to the general body of knowledge about collective information filtering systems, this research will also directly inform the development of CHNM's "PressForward" platform, a substantial modification of the popular "Wordpress" blogging application that will enable the aggregation and curation of online scholarly resources at both an editorial and community level. Funds from this grant also support the experimental expansion of PressForward, currently powering DigitalHumanitiesNow.org, into four additional scholarly disciplines.

Babies are born sterile. The microbial ecosystem that thrives on and inside each of us-stomach bacteria that help us digest food, for instance-are acquired post-birth, presumably through contact with our mothers. But what of babies born prematurely, separated from their mothers, and treated in sterile neonatal intensive care units? How do these infants acquire the microbes needed to survive outside the womb? This grant supports the research of UC, Berkeley professor Jill Banfield, who is investigating this very question. In a one-year pilot study with collaborator Dr. Michael Morowitz of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Banfield will examine the microbial profiles of the air, water, and surfaces of a neonatal intensive care unit and compare the profiles to those found in the gut of three premature infants staying in the ICU. Using modern molecular tools, the research team will analyze the microbial profiles of the neonatal intensive care unit environments over time and space to potentially identify the sources of microbes involved in infant gut colonization.