Research Funding of Roy Rada

Table of Contents

Pre-1981

Roy Rada was a Yale National Scholar (1969-1973) which guaranteed whatever financial support could not be provided directly by his family. He worked summers at Yale as a National Science Foundation research student in the Psychology Department at Yale. At Baylor College of Medicine Rada worked for the Department of Community Medicine on a research project about the computerization of patient records and funded by the National Institutes of Health (1974-1977). Subsequently Rada was hired as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana where he did research and earned a Ph.D. (1977-1981). (The Yale Univ. support amounted to about $5,000 per annum and the research support at Baylor College of Medicine was also approximately $5,000 per annum. The post-doctoral research position at the University of Illinois at Urbana supplied $20,000 per annum.).

Assistant Professor 1981-1984

In 1982 Rada was the recipient of a Wayne State University Research Grant for Characterization of Search Spaces" ($5 thousand). He was awarded a National Science Foundation Travel Grant of $1000 to present his paper at the 1983 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Germany. In 1983 Rada received a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Initiation Grant for ``Knowledge Acquisition for Medical Expert Systems". The grant's monetary value was $50 thousand.

Senior Government Researcher 1984-1988

In 1984 Rada moved to the Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine as a Research Officer. He was given two researchers to support his research efforts. In 1985 he was Editor of Index Medicus and Chief of the Medical Subject Headings Branch. He was also a director for the multi-million dollar Unified Medical Language System project . Rada retained his research office within the Lister Hill Center and was given a second office in the library proper. The job of Editor of Index Medicus included 1) being titular head of the production of Index Medicus which involved a staff of 300 people and 2) deciding which 3,000 journals of the world's 20,000 should be covered by Index Medicus. As Chief of the Medical Subject Headings Branch, Rada directly controlled a staff of 12 professionals whose main function was to maintain the massive 100,000 concept thesaurus which was used to index the medical literature.

The National Library of Medicine is part of the United States government and its employees are not allowed to apply for funds from the National Science Foundation or any other sources. However, a comparison to university funding that might have been obtained can be estimated by looking at the resources which Rada controlled. Rada was able to maintain the equivalent of about 4 full-time research staff and 12 production staff. The salaries of the research staff would be about $70 thousand per annum. The partial control of multi-million dollar funded projects, such as the Unified Medical Language System project, provided Rada control over say $100 thousand per annum of research funding. Thus Rada's research budget was $170 thousand per annum for the period 1984-1988 or a total of $680 thousand.

Liverpool 1988-1992

On his return to university work in 1988, Rada began in earnest to acquire research funding. In his first efforts at the University of Liverpool, Rada recruited Ph.D. students and then needed to find funding for the students. Hewlett-Packard proved amenable to providing such funding and a constructive relationship between Rada's research group and Hewlett-Packard began. Hewlett-Packard provided:

  • Three studentships ($100 thousand).
  • Equipment donation of 5 workstations, 2 personal computers, file server, 500 megabyte disk, scanner, readable-writable optical disk, and associated software ($100 thousand).

    The Commission of the European Communities is the administrative unit of the European Economic Community (EEC) and in an effort to unite Europe is collecting taxes for research and re-distributing them after very competitive peer-review to research and development consortia. This EEC funding is comparable in Europe to what NSF funding in the USA might be. In his first year in England Rada succeeded in leading a consortium in winning an EEC research grant to develop an intelligent document retrieval system.

    In 1990-91 Rada also acquired several small contracts with the EEC, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the University of Liverpool. The EEC contract was to develop thesauri. The NATO grant was for numerous trips between Liverpool and Montreal for researchers to collaborate across sites. The University of Liverpool awarded Rada a New Professor's Fund for research staff.

    In 1992 Rada became involved in a large EEC project on software reuse. This project brought $140 thousand to the University of Liverpool. One of the partners in the project was Asea Brown Boveri research laboratories in Heidelberg, Germany. Asea Brown Boveri then provided Rada's group an additional research grant.

    In summary form, the grants received during the 1988-1992 period are:

    The total funding for this period is $540 thousand.

    Liverpool 1992-1995

    Rada continued his efforts to work with the EEC, and in 1992 these efforts were rewarded with two large EEC research contracts:

    The work with the EEC Distance Education program coincided with an emphasis in Rada's group on courseware development.

    Educational technology can be particularly easily applied in a computer science environment. Applying this technology to the rather different health care environment gives another perspective on its utility. Rada's group explored the application of educational technology both in the university and within the broad health care environment:

    These various projects have related to the broader interest of Rada's research group in the role of groupware and hypermedia in helping people. The total funding to the University of Liverpool between 1992 and 1995 was $699 thousand.

    Boeing Distinguished Professor 1995-1998

    In August 1995 Rada assumed the Boeing Distinguished Professorship of Software Engineering at Washington State University. This position includes an annual discretionary fund of $25 thousand.

    Between September 1996 and May 1996, Rada was the Virtual University Academic Officer. This position entailed considerable administrative work and was in some ways like his work 10 years earlier at the National Library of Medicine. For instance, he operated as a kind of project officer for external donations to be distributed by competitive bid within Washington State University. The resources to be thusly distributed were worth about $1 million. Rada was also provided part-time staff to help manage the project.

    In the summer of 1996 NSF awarded a $51k grant to Mohammed Osman, Pat Flynn, and Roy Rada for educational technology for a "Solid State Device Animation Laboratory".

    In January 1997 Rada assumed co-principal position in a 18-month contract worth $500,000+ from the Paul Allen Virtual Education Foundation.

    Pace University 1998-1999

    Rada was at Pace University for 1 year as a Professor of Computer Science and of Information Systems. He was recruited to co-lead the University's new online Associates Degree in Telecommunications that was funded by the Sloan Foundation "Asychronous Learning Networks" Initiative and all the major telecommunications companies of the US.

    UMBC 1999-

    Roy had some start-up funding from UMBC and was Director of the Online Masters in Information Systems which was created in co-operation with the British Open University and funded by both universities. He was the principal investigator on a project funded by the Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) to UMBC with partners of Coppin State College and Microsoft Corporation. MHEC provided $200,000 to UMBC and in kind contributions from the partners was $400,000. The project lasted from 2000-2002.

    I have begun a new life in intelligent financial investing. I have obtained my first funding in this area in April 2008 as a Faculty Innovation Grant for $3,000 that must be spent by June 30, 2009 from the Alex Brown Center for Entrepreneurship at UMBC. A $1,500 grant was obtained from the UMBC Undergraduate Research Fund to support Matt Schultz for Spring 2009 and Matt Jancasz in Fall 2009 for work in Intelligent Investing Systems.

    I have also begun working in 2010 on research in sleep apnea. I had a UMBC URAS Award for Spring 2010 that was spent on Scott Rothman. For Spring 2011 I also have a UMBC URAS Award for work on sleep apnea (that was awarded in October 2010).

    In Fall 2013 I was a visiting scientist at Tabuk University, Tabuk, Saudia Arabia. My support included exactly air fare and accommodation in a trip that went as follows:

    Air fare cost $25,000 and accommodation cost $8,000 -- making this a support package worth $33,000. I gave two keynote speeches at a conference on computer science education, visited several classes, and worked on a research proposal while in Tabuk. In Singapore I met with officials of the new Yale-National University of Singapore campus. The trip was from Nov. 11, 2013 through Dec. 5, 2013.