The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is a program designed to fulfill the National Science Foundation's (NSF) mandate to promote scientific progress nationwide. The EPSCoR program is directed at those jurisdictions that have historically received lesser amounts of NSF Research and Development (RD) funding. Twenty-seven states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands are currently eligible to participate. Through this program, NSF establishes partnerships with government, higher education and industry that are designed to effect lasting improvements in a state's or region's research infrastructure, RD capacity and hence, its national RD competitiveness. Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: Track-1 (RII Track-1) awards provide up to $4 million per year for up to 5 years to support physical, human, and cyber infrastructure improvements in research areas selected by the jurisdiction's EPSCoR governing committee as having the best potential to improve future RD competitiveness of the jurisdiction.

The CreativeIT Program solicits proposals for projects that explore synergistic cross disciplinary research in creativity and computer science and information technology. Information technology is playing an increasing role in extending the capability of human creative thinking and problem solving. The study of creativity and computing as a way to advance computer science and information technology, cognitive science, engineering, education, or science can lead to new models of creativity and creative computational processes, innovative approaches to education that encourage creativity, innovative modes of research that include creative professionals, and new technology to support human creativity.

The Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program seeks to reveal new understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess, and to develop a practical understanding of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing. By better characterizing, understanding, and eventually designing for desired behaviors arising from computationally mediated groups of people at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation, new models of computation, new forms of culture, and new types of interaction will result. Further, the investigation of such systems and their emergent behaviors and desired properties will inform the design of future systems. The SoCS program will support research in socially intelligent computing arising from human-computer partnerships that range in scale from a single person and computer to an Internet-scale array of machines and people. The program seeks to create new knowledge about the capabilities these partnerships can demonstrate - new affordances and new emergent behaviors, as well as unanticipated consequences and fundamental limits. The program also seeks to foster new ideas that support even greater capabilities for socially intelligent computing, such as the design and development of systems reflecting explicit knowledge about people's cognitive and social abilities, new models of collective, social, and participatory computing, and new algorithms that leverage the specific abilities of massive numbers of human participants. The SoCS program seeks to capitalize upon the collaborative knowledge and research methods of investigators in the computational and human sciences, recognizing that researchers in computer science and related disciplines often focus on the limits and capabilities of computation in isolation from the people that use computation, while researchers in the social sciences often focus on the use of technology or the capabilities of people with limited impact on how such knowledge can influence the design of new technologies. Proposals that reflect collaborative efforts spanning computational and human centered approaches and perspectives are specifically encouraged.

CISE's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) supports research and education projects that develop new knowledge in three core programs: The Human-Centered Computing program; The Information Integration and Informatics program; and The Robust Intelligence program. IIS is also responsible for managing the review process for proposals in computer graphics and visualization; these proposals may be submitted to any of the three core programs described above. Proposers are invited to submit proposals in three project classes, which are defined as follows: Small Projects - up to $500,000 total budget with durations up to three years; Medium Projects - $500,001 to $1,200,000 total budget with durations up to four years; and Large Projects - $1,200,001 to $3,000,000 total budget with durations up to five years. A more complete description of the three project classes can be found in section II. Program Description of this document. CISE investments in Small, Medium and Large projects complement the directorate's investments in the Expeditions in Computing program, http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503169&org=CISE, where projects are funded at levels of up to $10,000,000 total for durations up to 5 years.