NSF CISE/IRIS, NSA Office of Research and SIGINT Technology, CIA Office of R&D (ORD), and DARPA Information Technology Office (ITO) have announced a "STIMULATE" fundamental research initiative in speech, text, image, video, gesture, facial expression, handwriting, discourse and dialog phenomena, and other advanced technology for multimodal human communication. This includes degraded or noisy signals, such as from OCR or cellular telephones. "Further advances in understanding human communication may require taking advantage of the modality at the same time, or may require the development of new approaches to understanding a single modality." Multidisciplinary proposals are sought. NSF will conduct the merit review, followed by joint-agency panel evaluation. 9/1/96 deadline. NSF 96-85, from or . Gary W. Strong , (703) 306-1928. [IRLIST Digest, 5/20/96.] (NSF suggests visiting to look for work in progress by potential collaborators. Conference proceedings and online preprints (or queries to discussion groups) are other ways of locating partners. Multi-institutional proposals definitely have an advantage at NSF, as long as they aren't just "umbrella" proposals for independent work.)

A $1K Information Science Abstracts (ISA) Research Grant is awarded each year by Documentation Abstracts, Inc. (DAI) for library or information science graduate degree holders working in the primary or secondary literature of information science. Apply by 8/30/96. Signe E. Larson , 503/368-6990. [Judy Watson , IRLIST Digest, 5/13/96.]

CONACyT-List is an open discussion of the Mexican Council for Science and Technology. . [, net-hap, 5/10/96.]