The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s new Technology Innovation Program (TIP) seeks white papers to help support, promote, and accelerate innovation in the U.S. The white papers will be used to help shape the program’s competitions in the future.
NIST is interested in receiving white papers from academia, federal, state, and local governments, industry, professional organizations, and societies. White papers may discuss any area of critical national need such as personalized medicine and complex networks and systems along with other topics such as civil infrastructure, energy, future water supplies, manufacturing, nanomaterials, nanotechnology, and sustainable chemistry.
NIST wants to see personalized medicine addressed since spending per capital in the U.S is high and rising. Currently, the need is to develop effective advanced tools and techniques for genomics and proteomics research. This will help to provide a greater understanding of complex biological systems, biomarker identification, and targeted drug and vaccine deliver systems. There is also a need for improved and low cost diagnostic and therapeutic systems and for better methods for the integration and analysis of biological data, especially when combined with environmental and patient history data.
NIST notes that complex networks and complex systems are very important particularly for biological systems communications networks, security systems, personalized healthcare and other areas. Today, no single organization has the ability to effectively control multi-scale, distributed, and highly interactive networks. Stability and control of these networks can have far reaching consequences in our society. Complex network theory is important in order to model neural systems and to research the molecular physiological response to disease and environmental systems.
The White Papers along with the ideas from government, technical communities, and other stakeholders will be incorporated into the TIP competition selection. For more information, go to www.nist.gov/tip/frn_seeking_whitepapers.pdf. There are several deadlines for the submission of white papers to TIP. The deadlines are January 15, March 9, May 11, and July 13, 2009.
