“I’m going to print up bumper stickers: Just Say NO to Incrementalism!” said Jeannette Wing yesterday. Her audience of 400 — mostly engineering-school deans and computer-science-department chairs — sat up a little straighter in their seats, because Wing was calling for proposals to help her spend $52-million dollars in grant money by 2008.

Ms. Wing has the money. She’s the new assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation. And she’s pushing for “audacious proposals” for a new NSF program: Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation.

Ms. Wing made her plea at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, a meeting of the minds in Redmond, Wash., put on by the software company’s corporate research lab. And Microsoft Research has some bling of its own that it is trying to hand out. The lab announced it will dedicate more that $6-million in research grants to colleges and universities. “We really have to work very closely with academia if we are going to push the state of the art,” said Henrique Malvar, managing director of Microsoft Research.

Microsoft is looking for proposals in several areas: cellphones as a platform for health care, biomedical computing for genome studies, the “intelligent Web” (context-aware and mobile applications), human-robot interaction, and a few more. Not surprisingly, these areas are also key to the company’s research and corporate agenda.

The NSF program is looking for research projects that explore radically new concepts for connecting the computational and physical worlds — like making sense of data extracted from the comings and goings of proteins in a cell, or modeling the interactions between the earth and its atmosphere, Ms. Wing said.

“We’re drowning in data,” she said. “We have so much that we are throwing data away. We need to improve our ability to extract knowledge from all this data.” The new program is supposed to run for another five years, with a new round of $50-million in grants in each of those years.

While many of the 400 invitees were excited by the chance for grants, some were privately skeptical that the grants would really go to radical ideas. “Incrementalism is hard to get away from,” said one, who has worked both at Microsoft and for government science agencies. “There’s a lot of reluctance to take risks. Jeannette is new. We’ll see what she says in six months.” —Josh Fischman

Categories: Research, Company-Watch