Rejection notice

To: Dr. Paul Prueitt, et al,

On behalf of ARDA, I regret to inform you that your 2005 Challenge/Seedling Workshop proposal entitled "Developing Anticipatory Responses from Thematic Analysis of Social Discourse" has not been accepted as a finalist for oral presentations. The reviewers found the assessment of workshop proposals very challenging. The evaluation process was highly competitive, with 43 submissions coming from a wide variety of organizations. Thirteen proposals were selected by ARDA to advance to the final Executive Committee (EC) review and selection meeting, which will occur on 8 and 9 November. In a subsequent communication we may be able to pass on to you some of the comments made by the reviewers who contributed to the evaluation. We hope this feedback will help you in future proposals. The review and selection process itself was conducted by members of the EC and ARDA, with no input from the Regional Research Centers or their staff.

We welcome any feedback on the Challenge Workshop proposal process so that we can enhance our procedures for future years. On behalf of ARDA, the Executive Committee, and the Regional Research Centers, we would like to thank you for all the effort you and your team put into crafting your proposal. We look forward to your future participation in regional research center activities.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mark Maybury Executive Director, NRRC The MITRE Corporation

Dr. Rich Quadrel Director, NWRRC Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Dr. John Meadors Director, SERRC GTRI

Tim Persons Technical Director, ARDA

Karl Roenigk Program Manager, ARDA

Reply from Paul Prueitt

This opinion is a very disappointing outcome, but entirely expected. Our expectation was that this funding was designed to go to an inside group and that the evaluation would not be objective and would not be fair. The many incidents of funding that is designed to go to one community and yet is treated as a BAA or an open RFP is stunning, and involves many individuals.

You indicate that there may be some feedback.

Respectfully, we will receive the allowed comments from the reviewers so that we can develop a correct picture of the evaluation and the competition. Comments from the reviewers will be published along with our proposal, and the two will be distributed within various communities for additional remarks.

We expect that the comments be sufficient to allow a historical perspective as to why this most interesting challenge problem was not funded by ARDA, and was not even allowed an oral presentation. The non-funding of even a study as to the merit of this challenge problem is simply not excusable, in our principled opinion.

This picture will be conveyed politically because political activity is the only recourse that has any possibility of objective consideration.

Frankly, these funding programs MUST come to understand the damage that is done in not allowing any compensation or reward for the level of effort that groups make in trying to advance a set of innovations. We asked that it not be all or non, because no funding again is a action that makes the survivability of the approach in question. We asked that a seeding status be given if the evaluation really could not spare the funds for a more full funding. We communicated that for this group, some minimal funding was critical.

A let them eat cake is not the proper response to the dire and critical need for some small amount of funding by innovators whose work is methodologically marginalized and for which there are deeply rooted, and non-objective, bias. The history of our group’s treatment is clear. We have made one proposal after another for four years. We have traced and documented a specific set of funding biases that is widely perceived to have created a specific distortion of the very foundations of science. We have placed our work within that part of what might be science, except for the federal procurement failures. We are widely appreciated but not funded, while others like Cyc Corp, whose work is known to have not produced according to past expectations, are re-funded as if some entitlement exists for their support and not for ours.

The funding of some types of work and not others is not the selection of the best science; it is an expression of narrow and provincial thinking. The nation is not served by methodological exclusions of schools of thought that have innovations of great importance.

Our history is clear, and there is extensive concern about the dismissive-ness of funding agencies to the work that has been offered over and over again.

The notion of an anticipatory measurement of social discourse will, of course, eventually be discovered.

The BCNGroup has developed a light of day activity that places the submission, the evaluations and the record of those who are funding into the public domain. We will keep this record NOT because there is any recourse for us, but for the sake of history.

Eventually our work will find the minimal amount of funding needed to complete the first products and enter fully into a marketplace.

With great and deep and profound disappointment, and resentment, in the evaluation process, respectfully

Dr. Paul Prueitt