2017 ERIT Request for Proposal

Program Goal

The Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology Enriching Rice Through Information Technology (ERIT) seed funding solicitation is an opportunity for Rice faculty and researchers to receive funding in support groundbreaking research collaboration. The ERIT program aims to incubate and support innovative projects that promote the use of information technology to accelerate innovations in research, scholarship and education.

The program specifically aims to support proposals that:

  • demonstrate potential for new external research funding
  • promote and develop multidisciplinary research*
  • advance computing and information technology research

* In addition to the ERIT awards funded by the Ken Kennedy Institute, this year’s solicitation also includes an award supported by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). For the AMD funded track, we are specifically interested in supporting one or more projects that can help advance and provide insights into the use of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and similar products. Of special interest is tools and applications that can facilitate and/or demonstrate benefit and advantage of tight coupling of CPU scalar processing and GPU parallel processing in a single package with a shared high-bandwidth unified system memory.  Research of acceleration of widely used codes in cloud based applications and/or data intensive applications are highly desirable. A multidisciplinary focus is not as important for the AMD track.  Please contact us with any questions you might have about the AMD track.

Proposal Submission

Proposals must be submitted online. Use this form to submit your proposal. For additional details on the format of your proposal see the Proposal Requirements section below.

Contacts

  • Jan E. Odegard, Executive Director, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. Phone: 713.348.3128; E-mail: odegard@rice.edu
  • Victoria Langlais, Associate Director, Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology. Phone: 713.348.5823; E-mail: vl5@rice.edu

Eligibility Information

  • PI eligibility limit: Regularly appointed full-time tenured or tenure track faculty, faculty fellows, and research professors at Rice are eligible to be lead principal investigators.
  • Proposal limit: A faculty member can only be a PI/Co-PI on one proposal.

Deadlines/Proposal Submission

  • Proposal deadline: Tuesday, October 17, 2017
    • Only electronically submitted proposals will be accepted.
    • Announcements will be made in late December 2017 or early January 2018 with a targeted project start date of January 1, 2018.

Award and Budget Information

Anticipated available funding for ERIT program: $75,000, pending availability of funds.

  • Maximum budget for a single project not to exceed $20,000 for one-year awards or $35,000 total for two-year awards.  Award period not to exceed two years.
  • A maximum of 15% of the total budget can be for faculty support (salary plus fringes), and a maximum of 10% of the total budget can be used to support travel.
  • Honoraria are not allowable. Travel must be requested and approved in the original budget.  Money must be spent at Rice (i.e., not used to fund research at another institution), any deviations from this must be pre-approved by the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology.

Proposal Requirements

The proposal should be organized as follows:

Cover page (web form that you fill in online when submitting the proposal)

  1. Project title
  2. Proposed start and end date
  3. List of investigators
  4. Amount of total funding requested
  5. Brief project summary (use accessible layman’s terms language)
  6. Attach main body of proposal (PDF, see details below)
  7. Attach a detailed budget for proposal
    • There is no institutional F&A on these grants but you must include fringes and/or tuition remission on any salary requested.

Main body of proposal to be uploaded (max 6 pages, use 1” margins and 11 point or larger Times New Roman font)

  1. Specific aims of proposed work(max 1 page)
  2. Background and related work (max 1 page)
  3. Description of research to be performed (max 2 pages)
  4. Describe future external funding opportunities and specifically discuss how this seed award , if funded, will be key to enable external funding (max 1 page)
    • Clearly spell out how this seed funding will directly impact the researcher’s ability to obtain new (external) funding.
    • List specific programs whenever possible and point out how and why the seed funding is critical.
    • Two year projects must make a strong case for why second year funding will be needed and must be closely linked to external funding objectives.
  5. Project Timeline & Plan (1 page)
    • Who will work on the project, timeline and statement of broader impact.

Additional information (there is no page limit)

  1. Short (max 2 pages) CV for each PI (required) CV should be in NSF (preferred format) or NIH style
  2. Bibliography
  3. Other relevant documents

Proposal Review Information

The Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology will coordinate and review all proposals. Reviewers will be asked to score each proposal in the following overarching criteria:

  • Significance
  • Readiness
  • Approach
  • Innovation
  • Investigators
  • Environment

Click here to see additional proposal review details.

Reporting, Communications & Conditions

Award recipients will be required to sign the Research Agreement will be required to enter the award details in the Cayuse portal before funding can be granted.

Award Administration

Once required documents have been signed and the budget has been approved, a budget entry will be made to the department of the lead PI at Rice. Proposals that request part of the budget to be used as cost share will, upon request, be provided with a letter of support to be included with the proposal you are planning to submit. Cost sharing funds will not be made available before an award letter of such funding has been submitted to K2I as evidence of success in attracting external funding.

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