Current Funding Opportunities

This program solicits foundational research aimed towards a deeper understanding and formalization of the bi-directional relationship between software systems and the complex social and legal contexts within which software systems must be designed and operate. The DASS program aims to bring researchers in computer and information science and engineering together with researchers in law and social, behavioral, and economic sciences to jointly develop rigorous and reproducible methodologies for understanding the drivers of social goals for software and for designing, implementing, and validating accountable software systems. DASS will support well-conceived collaborations between these two groups of researchers. The first group consists of researchers in software design, which, for the purposes of this solicitation, is broadly defined as formal methods, programming languages, software engineering, requirements engineering and human-centered computing. The second group consists of researchers in law and the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, who study social systems and networks, culture, social norms and beliefs, rules, canons, precedents, legal code, and routine procedures that govern the conduct of people, organizations, and countries. Proposals must create general advances in both (1) understanding the social, behavioral, economic and/or legal context of software design; and (2) improving the methodology for designing accountable software beyond specific use cases.

Projects are limited to $750,000 in total budget, with durations of up to three years. Please see the solicitation for more details: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21554/nsf21554.htm

Deadline: April 19, 2021

Contacts: 

Nina Amla, Anindya Banerjee, Sol Greenspan

Program Directors

Software and Hardware Foundations

National Science Foundation