Smart and Connected Communities

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is offering a grant program called the Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC). This program is designed to boost the creation of scientific and engineering advancements which will aid in the development of smart and connected communities. These communities will aim to enhance economic growth, safety, health, accessibility, inclusivity, and overall quality of life.

A smart and connected community, as per the definition of the NSF, is a community that seamlessly blends intelligent technologies with natural and built environments, including infrastructure, in order to improve the socio-economic well-being and the environmental health of its inhabitants.

This program is applicable to geographically-defined areas including towns, cities, counties, neighborhoods, rural areas, and tribal regions. These areas are supposed to have the capability to engage in proposed research activities meaningfully. The S&CC program encourages researchers to cooperate with community stakeholders to identify challenges and convert them into research questions.

Stakeholders in this context can encompass residents, community groups, philanthropic or nonprofit organizations, businesses, libraries, museums, schools, and local government departments like public works departments, and health and social services agencies.

The S&CC program is keen on projects that can sustain their results even after the termination of the project. This includes the scalability and transferability of the proposed solutions.

The program will support research projects in two main categories. The first is the S&CC Integrative Research Grants (SCC-IRG) Tracks 1 and 2 which support fundamental integrative research. Track 1 awards can request budgets between $1,500,001 and $2,500,000 for up to four years. On the other hand, Track 2 awards have a budget cap of $1,500,000 and cover a period of up to three years.

The second category is the S&CC Planning Grants (SCC-PG) aimed at building capacity to prepare project teams for future SCC-IRG proposals. Requests for these grants should not exceed $150,000 for a one-year period.

The S&CC program is a cross-directorate initiative and is supported by NSF's Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE).