Eve A. Riskin - US grants

Riskin New ways to use Vector Quantization (VQ) other than strictly for data compression are being investigated, and are being applied to applications such as image processing, halftoning, progressive transmission, and immunity against communication channel noise. In many applications, both VQ and many image processing operations are applied to small subblocks of an image. The image processing step can be applied ahead of time to each vector in a VQ codebook, with the processed vectors stored along with the codebook. If the computational complexity of the VQ encoder is lower than that of the image processing step, this reduces the computational complexity. This approach is being applied to halftoning, edge detection, and histogram equalization. In a progressive transmission system, the received image is reconstructed as an increasingly better reproduction of the transmitted image as bits arrive. Ways to organize and order a VQ codebook so that it can be used for direct progressive transmission of full search VQ are being studied. In an ordered VQ, the VQ codeword index is correlated with the codeword location in the input space. This ordinal mapping feature of clustering codewords with similar indexes to obtain additional reproduction vectors for the decoder is being exploited. Extentions to progressive transmission of ordered VQ indexes over noisy communication channels are being included.

EIA-9973531
Riskin, Eve A.
University of Washington

CISE/POWRE: Strategies to Add Redundancy for Graceful Degradation of Image and Video Quality over Lossy Packet Networks

This project will develop, analyze, and apply new algorithms to assign unequal erasure protection (UEP) to progressive data to provide graceful degradation against packet loss. If severe packet loss occurs, the most important data would be received by the decoder instead of the less important data. These new algorithms will be practical in that they will lead to improved image and video quality at the receiver in cases of high packet loss rates. Our new algorithms will have practical use in many arenas including the Internet and wireless communications.

The goal of this project is to contribute to the development of a national science and engineering academic workforce that includes the full participation of women in all levels of faculty and academic administration, particularly at the senior academic ranks, through the transformation of institutional practices, policies, climate and culture. The University of Washington (UW) recognizes the important contributions that women make in science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM), and the factors that still inhibit women's full participation. The University proposes to create the Center for Institutional Change (CIC) to design and implement programs to help eliminate obstacles to women's full participation and advancement in the SEM disciplines. Many of these challenges occur in departments, so changing departmental culture will be a part of the CIC mission.

The CIC will focus on these issues in SEM on campus:

Leadership development for chairs and deans
Department cultural change
Policy change
Leadership development
Short-term support program for faculty in times of transition

The work of the CIC will seve all groups (men, women, underrepresented) and improve the environment for everyone in SEM. UW will share its experiences with other institutions, professional societies, and industrial partners that are addressing the issues of low representation of women faculty in engineering and science. A network will be established to facilitate dissemination, and UW will work with Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, CH2M Hill, and REI to share best practices.

This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers.

Proposal # 0104800
PI: Eve Riskin
U of Washington

In the not-too-distant future, downloading images and video to a handheld device will be as commonplace as viewing an image on a Web page is today. To enable this, high quality, flexible, and robust image and video compression algorithms will be required. Recently, Group Testing for Wavelets (GTW), a new type of wavelet coder based on group testing was developed. It offers competitive performance to the best compression coders available today and with further development, GTW could outperform them significantly.

This research involves developing new algorithms for robust and flexible coding of images and video. Whereas
GTW is used as a motivating example, the research is applicable to many compression algorithms and in many scenarios. First, a set of problems related to GTW will be explored. This includes applying GTW to wavelet packet decompositions and reduced complexity transforms; extending it to video and the new area of progressive geometry compression; and developing a theory for its strong performance.
Next, methods for applying forward error correction to compressed data in a progressive manner will be investigated. Finally, unequal frame expansions will be used to recover from packet loss. The research will have practical use in many arenas including the Internet and wireless communications and will be included
in a new undergraduate course on data compression, to be taught jointly by the two principal investigators.

In the State of Washington, the engineering schools at the two major state universities (University of Washington and Washington State University) and four community colleges (Seattle Central Community College, Yakima Valley Community College, Highline Community College, and Columbia Basin College) along with other institutions in the State have formed the Northwest Engineering Talent Expansion Partnership (NW-ETEP). The overall project goal is to increase by ten percent the total number of students in the State of Washington that earn an undergraduate engineering degree over the next five years. Specifically, over the next five years, the NW-ETEP will 1) increase the number of underrepresented minorities that earn engineering degrees in the State by 100%; 2) increase the number of women that earn engineering degrees in the State by 20%, and 3) develop and implement a statewide strategy to fully utilize the capacity of all the State's engineering programs. Support programs are being jointly developed at each community college with an explicit focus on supporting underrepresented students in engineering with the intent to transfer. These efforts include a comprehensive team comprised of existing faculty and student services providers, an on-site coordinator, and services ranging from academic support to major/career exploration to transfer assistance/support. At the universities, efforts are focusing on increasing the retention of women by maximizing the use of existing services by the large population of women already interested in engineering that enter these institutions. And at the state-level, the team is implementing a comprehensive strategy to increase awareness among high school students, parents, teachers, and guidance counselors of all the options to earn engineering degrees in the state and all the existing support available to students.

Electrical Engineering (55)

This proposal aims to improve the electrical engineering (EE) student experience in the systems area: signal processing, communications and control. The goals are to enhance student learning of theory and connections to practice, to increase interest in EE and in the systems area and foster diversity in the student body, and to expand student participation in cross-disciplinary projects. The general approach involves introducing collaborative lab experiences and team projects based on realistic applications, and to include cross-disciplinary and remote collaboration. Since today's undergraduates are increasingly familiar with technologies such as digital music, photography, and video from everyday life, early and pervasive connection to the technology can aid in understanding of fundamental theoretical concepts. Thus, the program will embrace cutting-edge technology, both in terms of exposure of students to applications and in the use of this technology in teaching. The specific plans impact the undergraduate curriculum at three levels: development of a new freshman introductory EE course, revision of an existing EE core course in signals and systems, and expansion of senior capstone design opportunities. Necessarily, the course developments will involve improvements to laboratory equipment used in teaching, as well as development of new course materials and teaching strategies. The proposed curriculum developments build on specific course material developed elsewhere, as well as results in the literature on collaborative learning. The evaluation of the proposed work with respect to the learning objectives and diversity goals will include both formative and summative efforts, including standard course evaluation forms, focus groups, attitude surveys, analysis of students' responses to specific exam questions, and quantitative analysis of inter-student classroom interactions, being conducted with assistance form the college's center for learning and teaching. Dissemination is being accomplished through the Connections website, a site that hosts course modules, and through presentations and papers at both education and technical conferences.

Video-enabled cell phones have the potential to enable deaf Americans to speak in their community's native language, American Sign Language (ASL), and gain the freedom, flexibility, and comfort of the wireless phone revolution. This research involves the design, implementation, and evaluation of new standards-compliant data compression methods that will allow ASL video, and other structured video, to be transmitted over low bandwidth cell phone channels. To be more specific, the goal of this research is to develop a framework in which to implement low-complexity H.264 encoding to provide maximum quality compressed structured video. Because the developed algorithms will be H.264 standard-compliant, an off-the-shelf H.264 decoder can be used.

The research applies to any class of videos where there is some inherent structure that can be exploited. The five areas of research are: (1) Design of an appropriate objective distortion metric for ASL; (2) Design of algorithms to preprocess video for display on small devices; (3) Development of methods to exploit structure in video for efficient coding; (4) Implementation of a rate-distortion-complexity optimization of H.264 using the new metric; and (5) Applications of the framework to other structured video such as surveillance video. Studies with ASL users are used to develop the objective intelligibility metric and to evaluate the new compression techniques.

While women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have made significant strides in the last several decades, gender discrepancies still exist in these disciplines. The strategies and programs for institutional transformation created by the first two rounds of ADVANCE schools to support the advancement of women faculty in STEM have gone far beyond administrative rhetoric. They have challenged and redefined the status quo and have benefited not only women faculty, but also the faculty at large.

In general, at many universities and colleges, faculty professional development is not explicitly addressed. While research, and increasingly teaching, support has been available on campuses, other areas of faculty work (service, leadership, networking, etc.) have received very little attention. Yet these areas are critical to success of the faculty overall, and play an important role in the likelihood of advancement, particularly for women faculty.

Academic leaders, and particularly department chairs, carry considerable responsibility for departmental faculty recruitment, advancement, and retention. In this respect, they are key players in the institutional transformation process and in setting the climate of their departments. Few resources are available to support this role, however, and many chairs have little regular access to other department chairs, who could provide peer mentoring.
The goal of this ADVANCE PAID proposal is to provide department chairs with the resources, skill development, and peer networks that will support more effective department leadership and governance, and contribute to a more positive department culture for all faculty.

The University of Washington will implement a series of two-day national leadership workshops over a three-year period for department chairs, deans, and emerging leaders in STEM. One workshop will be held each year at the University of Washington (UW), and in two of the three years, a second workshop will be held at an alternate regional site. These workshops are based on the UW ADVANCE program's quarterly leadership workshop series and two national pilot workshops. A pre-workshop mentoring-for-leadership event will be offered to women faculty at each workshop.

Intellectual Merit: The intellectual merit of this proposal is the creation of leadership and professional development opportunities for STEM department chairs and emerging leaders, particularly women faculty. The workshops will provide opportunities for academic leaders to address issues of gender equity, leadership, faculty recruitment, faculty professional development, family-friendly policies, and policy implementation. Each workshop will result in the creation of resources to support and advance issues relevant to the success of all faculty, and women faculty in particular.

Broader Impact: The national scope of the workshop allows the impact to be far reaching. The University of Washington will collaborate with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other institutions to include department chairs and faculty of color, particularly women. Holding workshops at regional locations will increase participation and ideally create local communities of department chairs who can continue to network and learn from each other, and potentially replicate parts of
the workshops at their own institutions. The national workshops provide a venue for STEM department chairs from around the country to exchange best practices and strategies. Up to 250 department chairs and emerging leaders are expected to attend the workshops. The project team will also be available for consultation with institutions interested in hosting local, campus-based workshops. All workshop materials will be widely distributed via websites, presentations, papers, etc.

Engineering - Other (59)
In this fast-changing world, it is virtually impossible to prepare engineering students for all of the problems they might encounter in their future careers. Recognizing this, ABET and other agencies have advocated that engineering programs instill in their students a recognition of the need for lifelong learning. Many institutions struggle to include lifelong learning courses and assessments in their programs. This project is developing a seminar course aimed at first-year engineering students that will instill in them a commitment to lifelong learning. Lifelong learning skills such as self-directedness, metacognition, and critical reflection are topics being included in the course. The courses are organized around a portfolio project through which students develop a vision of engineering as a profession and make a conceptual connection between mathematics and science and this vision. Students are exploring theories of learning and education and are reflecting on their own learning. Faculty development workshops to assist faculty in delivering the seminar course are also being accomplished through this project. The seminar course and workshops are being rigorously evaluated resulting in model assessment practices for lifelong learning outcomes.

Video-enabled cell phones have the potential to enable Deaf people to speak in their community's native language (which in the United States is American Sign Language or ASL), while gaining the freedom, flexibility, and comfort afforded by the wireless phone revolution. Real-time video-enabled cell phones are available in Japan and parts of Europe based on higher bandwidth cell phone technology, and Deaf people in those countries have already begun using these devices to communicate with each other. In the United States, however, it remains a major scientific and technical challenge to provide real-time video-enabled cell phones. The PIs' goal in their ongoing MobileASL effort has been to develop and evaluate low bandwidth, high fidelity, error-resilient, and low complexity software video encoders that are tailored for compressing ASL video; achieving such advances requires novel laboratory and field studies with Deaf individuals. The specific objectives of the current project are four fold: To implement improvements to the MobileASL codec including combined stabilization and compression algorithms for hand-held captured video, packet loss mitigation techniques, and further complexity reduction; To finalize the real-time implementation of the ASL codec on cell phones, To determine ideal default setting and desirable options for encoding through laboratory studies of the features of the PIs' ASL codec including region-of-interest coding, variable frame rate encoding, lower complexity encoding, and ASL-specific error concealment strategies; To conduct an extended field study with deployed cell phones in the Deaf community.

Broader Impacts: Left out of the cell phone revolution are the approximately 500,000 Deaf people in the United States who use ASL. This community has embraced Internet-enabled video phone technology, but still cannot speak with each other on cell phones in their natural language. This project will rectify that situation, by bringing mobile ASL communication to the Deaf community. By incorporating the Deaf community's input into the design of all aspects of the system, the PIs will help ensure that the ASL video cell phones will penetrate the Deaf community. By employing Deaf undergraduates as summer research interns, these students will be inspired to continue their research careers and seek higher degrees. Real-time video-enabled cell phones will also be useful for the general population who wish to communicate face-to-face in a mobile environment.

Strategic interventions are needed to achieve gender parity in the faculty ranks of science and engineering disciplines. Wooing women faculty in STEM from one university to another is, nationally, a zero-sum game. Instead of recruiting women away from other universities, there is a mostly-untapped pool of Ph.D.-level women scientists and engineers in industry and research laboratories. Many are very accomplished at their research, which is the primary figure of merit for success at Research-Extensive universities. With the proper mix of information, networking, and support, they could become very successful professors. The goal of this project is to increase the pool of women faculty available to all universities by providing professional development to Ph.D.-level women in industry or research laboratories. In particular, we will host a two-day workshop each year over a three-year period to provide practical tools and support to women who are interested in making the transition to academia. We will specifically target women who are a minimum of three-four years past their Ph.D. and/or postdoctoral position. The attendees and speakers will form a community who can support each other during the job application period, the interview process, the startup negotiations, and the first years in academia. In summary, the project will develop "On Ramps into Academia."

Intellectual Merit: It is of great interest to determine the challenges, skills, and resources needed for people to successfully make the transition from industry or national laboratories to academia. The assessment plan, which is strongly directed at outcomes evaluation, will help identify concrete best practices to encourage women into faculty pathways. By providing the necessary skills and advice to help women make successful transitions from industry to academia, UW ADVANCE will help develop a third pathway into academia, in addition to the current practices of hiring new Ph.D.s and postdoctoral fellows and hiring women away from other universities. This third pathway into academia is an original approach to recruitment and a creative way to expand the pool of women faculty in STEM.

Broader Impacts: This project will expand the national pool of women faculty in STEM disciplines. Even a small increase of STEM women faculty can improve the image of the disciplines and encourage more women to pursue them.

The project proposes to integrate NSF-funded efforts at the University of Washington (UW) in an innovative way to improve the experiences of underrepresented undergraduate minorities, women and students with disabilities in the College of Engineering. A primary catalyst for this synergy is the use of the UW's PEERs project (Promoting Equity in Engineering Relationships), which seeks to positively impact the climate of engineering through a cadre of change agents who create and encourage improved and more equitable relationships. The four institutional partners for the proposed collaboration are the institution's:
1. ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change;
2. Center for Workforce Development;
3. Center for Engineering Learning and Teaching (CELT); and
4. Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT).

These institutional partners will use the PEERs model to enhance the goals of three NSF-funded projects and to leverage lessons learned from the existing awards to work toward improving the climate for and the participation of underrepresented minority, female and disabled engineering students; and provide a foundation for campus-wide replication. The three NSF awards upon which the I3 project will build include:
1. Collaborative Research - Northwest Engineering Talent Expansion Partnership: A Coordinated Regional Recruitment and Retention Effort (DUE-0431659);
2. CCLI: Developing Engineering Lifelong Learners Through Freshman Seminars and Faculty Development Workshops (DUE-0737535); and
3. Northwest Alliance for Access to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (HRD-0227995).

Four primary objectives will be achieved by this project
1. Raise awareness of unconscious and implicit biases toward underrepresented minority, women and disabled students;
2. Promote actions both majority and underrepresented minority, women and disabled students and faculty can take to counteract these biases to cultivate a more welcoming and success-promoting climate;
3. Cultivate change agents among both student and faculty bodies; and
4. Build a foundation, and collaboration mechanisms, for future efforts to make STEM and other programs campus-wide welcoming and accessible to underrepresented minority, women and disabled students.

In 2008, the NSF ADVANCE program awarded a grant (HRD-0819407) to the University of Washington ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change (CIC) to implement the "On-Ramps into Academia" workshop series. The series aims to provide Ph.D. level women in industry, consulting, and government research labs with the information and resources necessary to make a successful transition back to academia as faculty.

The next workshop will be held October 18-20, 2009 in Seattle, WA. Of the fifteen applicants to date, eight have Ph.D.s in Computer Science and an additional woman has a Ph.D. in Technical Communication with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This supplement requests travel support for the these women in Computer Science to attend the On-Ramps workshop.

Through the S-STEM project "Engineering the Husky Promise," the University of Washington (UW) establishes a scholarship program for talented low-income undergraduates in UW's College of Engineering, thereby supporting the "Husky Promise" - a guarantee for full tuition and fee scholarships for Pell Grant-eligible Washington State residents. In the S-STEM program, each student is awarded a scholarship for up to $9000 per year for up to two years, depending on financial need. The program supports at least 15 students per year, and more, if not all students have this much unmet need. The significant financial support offered by S-STEM scholarships provides financially disadvantaged students additional time to focus on their studies, because they can work fewer hours at part-time jobs. Beyond the scholarships, College of Engineering professors serve as mentors to S-STEM Scholars, especially through undergraduate research, and the scholars are offered an opportunity to develop a professional portfolio. The College also reserves slots for scholarship recipients in its Engineering Community, an exciting experiential learning opportunity for engineering and pre-engineering students. Four Resident Advisers, mostly engineering students, connect Community members with resources and programs and act as peer mentors. On-site academic support, such as drop-in advising sessions, registration assistance, departmental and corporate information sessions, and tutoring sessions, is provided by the College of Engineering. Social and informational events are planned by both the Advisors and the College.

Specific objectives for "Engineering the Husky Promise" are that:
- minority students underrepresented in engineering, including those from local programs (Washington State GEAR-UP, MESA, and Rainier Scholars), receive at least 20% of the S-STEM scholarships;
- women receive at least 35% of the S-STEM scholarships;
- transfer students, of which half will be from UW MESA partner Community Colleges, receive at least 25% of the S-STEM scholarships,
- 81% of the S-STEM freshmen be admitted to a UW College of Engineering Department by the end of the sophomore year;
- 95% of S-STEM transfer students from community colleges graduate from a College of Engineering Department within three years; and
- at least 60% of S-STEM recipients participate in undergraduate research with College of Engineering faculty.

In order to serve students in the future and build on the basis of the S-STEM program, the College of Engineering is raising a sustainable endowment for additional scholarships.

This engineering education research initiation grant will help universities understand the effectiveness of outreach programs on engineering and faculty. Since outreach programs are common at many universities, there potential to utilize these programs for informal education of current engineering students. This project will research how to use these programs for both outreach and to support learning.

The broader significance and importance of this project will be to inform other university outreach programs how to be more efficient. The PI's plan to actively disseminate their findings to a broad community, thus potentially impacting recruitment and retention of a large number of students currently under-represented in engineering degree programs. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers through preparation of an engineering workforce with new capabilities and expertise. Additionally NSF's goal of innovating for society is enabled by creating results and research that are useful for society by informing educational policy and practices.

This project is being supported under a special funding focus for STEP, "Graduate 10K+," an activity of the National Science Foundation, supported in part by donations from the Intel Foundation and the GE Foundation, to stimulate comprehensive action at universities and colleges to help increase the annual number of new B.S. graduates in engineering and computer science by 10,000 over the next decade.

The University of Washington (UW) and Washington State University (WSU) are collaborating in an activity to develop and implement the Washington State Academic RedShirt (STARS) program to increase the retention rates of economically and educationally disadvantaged students who are incoming freshmen in engineering through a first-year curriculum that prepares these talented and highly motivated students for pre-engineering coursework. The STARS program is providing access to engineering degrees for 64 students per year from low-income (as defined by Pell Grant eligibility) and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds (as defined by high schools in Washington State with 50% or more of the students on free or reduced priced lunch). The project's goal is to increase the number of economically and educationally disadvantaged students graduating with engineering degrees from WSU and UW by 225 annually.

The intellectual merit of this project lies in the innovative and focused program based on effective evidence-based interventions to improve the success of first-year engineering students. The STARS program is adapted from the successful GoldShirt program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. STARS is strengthening the students' academic preparation and learning skills, connecting the students to a supportive academic and social community, providing personal and effective academic advising and counseling, building a clear and compelling understanding of the engineering profession, and providing significant financial support. During the students' first year at WSU and UW, they are receiving intensive support for developing the academic and learning skills required to be successful in engineering through interventions such as a first-year academic preparation curriculum and residential living-learning communities. During the second year, STARS students are continuing to be actively supported as they transition to a standard pre-engineering curriculum. The STARS program is expected to significantly increase student retention to the upper division, allowing STARS students to complete engineering degrees.

The project's broader impacts are being realized in the comprehensive and coordinated interventions that increase the number of minority and economically disadvantaged students pursuing, succeeding, and earning degrees in engineering. This activity, along with the ongoing activities focused on supporting community college and transfer students in STEM, presents a model for statewide collaboration across universities and community colleges to increase the retention and graduation rates in STEM. Moreover, robust strategies and strong relationships with existing programs for recruiting underrepresented minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged students are being leveraged to recruit STARS candidates.

From 2007 to 2009, the University of Washington?s ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change (UW ADVANCE) promoted the advancement of women and other underrepresented faculty in STEM departments across the nation by annually creating and delivering in-person Leadership Excellence for Academic Diversity (LEAD) workshops. The success of this initiative has prompted many more institutions in the U.S. to request LEAD workshops; however, it is not financially feasible, sustainable, or desirable for UW ADVANCE to continue to curate and offer in-person LEAD workshops. To meet the national demand for LEAD workshops, UW ADVANCE will create LEAD-it-Yourself! (LiY!), an online open source toolkit of planning and instructional materials to enable institutions to run their own local or regional LEAD-inspired workshops. LiY! will contribute to ADVANCE goals by disseminating LEAD planning and instructional materials to STEM departments across the nation. The online open source LiY! toolkit will provide UW ADVANCE leadership development content and best practices, customizable event planning guides, content guides (e.g., speakers suggestions, workshop topic ideas, leadership briefs with key tips and best practices, and sample presentations), and communication and evaluation templates that each institution can use as models. LiY!?s sustainability will be ensured by a leadership community that uses the online toolkit to engage in ongoing sharing, commenting, adapting, and rating of content and through an extensive iterative evaluation process.

The goal of the LiY! project is to disseminate UW ADVANCE LEAD content to a widely dispersed community of leaders in higher education so as to support independently-run academic diversity leadership development workshops across the country. We will create a website to host the online open source LEAD planning and instructional materials, and we will evaluate both the materials and the website in diverse institutional contexts. We will engage a diverse group of seven institutions in iterative evaluations to ensure that (1) the LiY! toolkit enables institutions to independently run fully customizable and successful leadership development workshops; and (2) the LiY! website supports usable and sustainable open source content dissemination. Pilot institutions will receive small amounts of seed funding for participating in the iterative evaluations.

LiY! will empower department chairs and faculty across the nation with rigorously evaluated and customizable materials for promoting the advancement of women and other underrepresented faculty in STEM. LiY! will encourage a community of leadership among geographically dispersed institutions through online dissemination and sharing.

The University of Washington, North Carolina State University, and California Polytechnic State Institute, San Luis Obispo submitted an ADVANCE PLAN D project whose overall goal is to increase the retention and advancement of women in academic careers to create greater diversity in engineering leadership. This project will build and facilitate a community-centric mentoring, networking, and career development program and will target early career women in electrical engineering and underrepresented minority women in engineering and computer science. The early career women (postdoctoral and early-career faculty stage) will be supported through cross-career stage networking, community building, career development symposia, and peer Mentoring Circles.

The project adapts two previously successful efforts at the University of Washington: 1) Women Evolving the Biological Sciences (WEBS): professional development symposia for early-career women in ecology and evolution and 2) Broadening the Representation of Academic Investigators in NeuroScience (BRAINS): symposia followed by Mentoring Circles for early career underrepresented minority neuroscientists. This project will examine how best to adapt these successful programs to two new disciplines and develop a model framework to allow others to develop such programs for a wide variety of fields and populations. To maximize program impact, the team will use ethnographic research methods to study the process and unique features of program development such as the collaboration between engineers and social scientists to develop new knowledge on the principles and processes critical to planning, implementing, and adapting successful intervention programs. The evaluation of the project will identify best practices to support women's success in academic careers and to diversify the engineering professoriate. The guiding principles and values that enable these programs to have impact on participants will be identified and codified in a framework that will be shared through the University of Washington's ADVANCE online "LEAD-it-Yourself!" toolkit.

The NSF ADVANCE Partnerships for Learning and Adaptation Networks (PLAN) program track supports projects that promote the adaptation and implementation of previously effective ADVANCE programs in new contexts and the testing of innovative strategies to promote the participation, success, and advancement of women in STEM academic careers. PLAN projects also contribute to the knowledge base on gender equity in STEM academic careers. The PLAN-D funding track is designed to expand the application of proven-successful gender-equity initiatives for STEM faculty in a specific disciplinary area through networked adaptation of a specific program or initiative. Careful evaluation is expected to expand understanding of such initiatives in a disciplinary context.

Low-income students are underrepresented in engineering and more likely to struggle in engineering programs. Research has found that increasing first and second-year retention enhances the ability of academically talented low-income students to successfully graduate with engineering degrees. In this collaborative research project six institutions will replicate, improve, and test a model of student success originally developed at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The model is designed to increase the retention, success, and graduation of low-income (Pell-eligible) academically talented students from underserved populations. The project will make scholarship awards to 800 students across a consortium of the six partner institutions. To support the students, the project will adapt and implement an ecosystem of high quality evidence-based curricular and co-curricular activities. Members of the consortium are: the University of Colorado, Boulder; the University of Washington; Washington State University; Boise State University; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and the University of California, San Diego.

The Redshirt in Engineering Consortium is committed to propagating the "Redshirt" model, which focuses primarily on the first-year of college and consists of intrusive academic advising, an innovative first-year academic curriculum, community building, and career awareness. The term "redshirt" refers to the idea of providing an extra year of preparation for the rigors of engineering curricula. A quantitative and qualitative mixed methods research study will examine the implementation of the model under different conditions and with different student populations. A comparative longitudinal study will examine differences in expected student outcomes between scholarship recipients and similar students who are pursuing engineering degrees. The primary analytic approach for the ethnographic research will be the Constant Comparative Analysis, which will involve concurrent engagement in data collection and data analysis.

Extant scientific literature indicates that women students in STEM, who take classes from women STEM faculty, are more likely to major in STEM disciplines. Therefore, engineering and science benefit from diversity. In 2015, the NSF ADVANCE Program awarded a grant (HRD-1500310) to the University of Washington, North Carolina State University, and California Polytechnic State University to create LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering), an adaptation of an existing professional development model that combines a national symposium with peer mentoring circles to broaden the participation of women in engineering, particularly at the underserved postdoctoral and early-career faculty stage. The intent of this travel grant is to support 30 early-career women in electrical engineering and computer science to attend the first LATTICE Symposium on May 18-21, 2017, outside of Seattle, Washington.

LATTICE intends to bring together engineering faculty, faculty diversity advocates and practitioners, and social scientists to create a professional development symposia, followed by peer Mentoring Circles for two national cohorts of early-career women interested in engineering faculty careers, to support women engineering faculty in electrical engineering and computer science and study what contributes to the success of the planning team and the intervention. The symposia, plus Mentoring Circles intervention, are designed to positively impact engineering women faculty's career self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and career advancing behaviors so that they are able to cultivate successful careers. The LATTICE project is also designed to obtain important information that can help the fields of electrical engineering and computer science better understand the efficacy of adapting the professional development model to different populations, such as women in engineering.

Increasing diversity in engineering and computer science has been a goal that remains elusive. Despite significant efforts, underrepresented minorities received only 16.1% and women received only 21.9% of engineering degrees in 2018. The reasons for these low numbers are complex and multifaceted and discrimination is an important factor in why students from these groups leave engineering. The goal of this research is to develop a holistic understanding of the impact of discrimination on historically underrepresented engineering students. In this era of big data and readily available technology such as mobile phones and wearables, a comprehensive change in how data about the college student experience are collected and assessed is possible. One can now move from lab to field, connect action to behavior, and collect longitudinal data. This, in turn, makes it possible to understand bias and its impact on engineering education in new ways: By complementing self-reports with passive data collection, big data can be used to create an image of behavior while learning about specific challenges underrepresented minority and female engineering students face.

The project will result in a uniquely powerful longitudinal data set, which captures real-time changes in student experiences and allows study of the impact of discrimination at scale across a variety of contexts. The project will quantify the scope, direction, and longitudinal impact on behavior and link this to long-term outcomes such as GPA and retention. This ability to connect behavior to experience in the field was lacking in past studies of discrimination. Analytic techniques capable of capturing both individual variance and looking at unequal numbers of observations, such as hierarchical linear modeling, are required due to the large sample (N=200/year) and number of variables. The data are collected at a large public university and will be most applicable to similar programs at similar institutions. The research will support policy making and intervention design in engineering programs. The ultimate goal is to diversify the pool of engineering students, which will be of direct benefit to society by increasing representation and the range of perspectives engaged in the engineering and computer science workforce.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

The Redshirt model is an alternative pathway for low-income, academically talented students, who want to pursue degrees and careers in engineering, computer science, science and mathematics, but need a stronger base of preparation. The model is based on Redshirt programs in athletics, in which a first year college student is given a year to prepare to compete at the university level. With evidence of the success of the Redshirt model in engineering across a set of research universities, this conference project will contribute to meeting the national need for engineers, computer scientists, and scientists by offering an opportunity to examine, implement, and investigate the implementation of the model at a broader array of institutions of higher education beyond research-intensive ones. The model also focuses on First-Time Full-Time students.

The conference will engage participants in the development and planned implementation of the model at their institutions. Organizers will leverage the experience of the Redshirt project team in establishing and maintaining the comprehensive model at six research universities. The conference agenda is driven by best practices and includes sessions on collaboration; key components of the model; mastery of STEM basics; intrusive advising; community building; study skills; student personal and professional development; partnering with industry; fund-raising; sustainability; and evaluation. A robust mixed-methods evaluation complements the comprehensive activities that are planned. The selection of participants will be based on commitment to establishing a Redshirt program at their institutions and on fostering the Redshirt model at a diverse set of institution (e.g., types, size, location).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.