Category Archives: @NIST

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Standards Curricula Program

NIST Standards Coordination Office Curricula Development Cooperative Agreement Program.

How to Apply | Awardees 2012-2025 | News Items

NIST Headquarters (Click on image)

 

NIST continues its Standards Curriculum program through the Standards Coordination Office Curricula Development Cooperative Agreement Program (SCO CD CAP), formerly known as the Standards Services Curricula Development Cooperative Agreement Program.  This ongoing initiative, started in 2012 (initially as Education Challenge Grants), funds U.S. colleges and universities to develop and integrate undergraduate and/or graduate-level curricula on documentary standards, standards development, and standardization into courses, modules, seminars, and learning resources.  The University of Michigan is a past recipient of a standards education award through this program.

The most recent funding round was for Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25):

  • The Notice of Federal Funding Opportunity (NOFO) was released on January 14, 2025.
  • Applications were due by April 14, 2025.
  • NIST anticipated awarding up to 8 grants, each up to $100,000, with project periods of up to 3 years (potentially extending into 2027–2028).

Projects funded under FY25 involve curriculum development and implementation that may continue into 2026 and beyond, including required workshops.

As of early 2026, no new Notice of Federal Funding Opportunity (NOFO) has been announced for FY2026. The program has historically issued funding rounds annually or near-annually, with recent awards in prior years (e.g., 2024 awards totaling over $1.1 million to 8 universities). However, due to proposed budget reductions for NIST in FY2026, future rounds may be impacted or delayed.


2024 Update: NIST Awards Funding to 8 Universities to Advance Standards Education


The Standards Coordination Office of the National Institute of Standards and Technology conducts standards-related programs, and provides knowledge and services that strengthen the U.S. economy and improve the quality of life.  Its goal is to equip U.S. industry with the standards-related tools and information necessary to effectively compete in the global marketplace. 

Every year it awards grants to colleges and universities through its Standards Services Curricula Cooperative Agreement Program  to provide financial assistance to support curriculum development for the undergraduate and/or graduate level. These cooperative agreements support the integration of standards and standardization information and content into seminars, courses, and learning resources. The recipients will work with NIST to strengthen education and learning about standards and standardization. 

The 2019 grant cycle will require application submissions before April 30, 2019 (contingent upon normal operation of the Department of Commerce).  Specifics about the deadline will be posted on the NIST and ANSI websites.  We will pass on those specifics as soon as they are known.

The winners of the 2018 grant cycle are Bowling Green State University, Michigan State University,  Oklahoma State University, and Texas A&M University. (Click here)

The University of Michigan received an award during last year’s grant cycle (2017).   An overview of the curriculum — human factors in automotive standards  — is linked below:

NIST Standards Curricula INTRO Presentation _ University of Michigan Paul Green

Information about applying for the next grant cycle is available at this link (Click here) and also by communicating with Ms. Mary Jo DiBernardo (301-975-5503; maryjo.dibernardo@nist.gov)

LEARN MORE:

Click here for link to the previous year announcement.

Technical Requirements for Weighing & Measuring Devices

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent

 

Time & Frequency Services

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is responsible for maintaining and disseminating official time in the United States. While NIST does not have a direct role in implementing clock changes for daylight saving time, it does play an important role in ensuring that timekeeping systems across the country are accurate and consistent.

Prior to the implementation of daylight saving time, NIST issues public announcements reminding individuals and organizations to adjust their clocks accordingly. NIST also provides resources to help people synchronize their clocks, such as the time.gov website and the NIST radio station WWV.

In addition, NIST is responsible for developing and maintaining the atomic clocks that are used to define Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard for timekeeping. UTC is used as the basis for all civil time in the United States, and it is the reference time used by many systems, including the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the internet.

Overall, while NIST does not have a direct role in implementing clock changes for daylight saving time, it plays an important role in ensuring that timekeeping systems across the country are accurate and consistent, which is essential for the smooth implementation of any changes to the system.

CLICK IMAGE to access complete document

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Time Realization and Distribution

Horologiorum

Artificial Intelligence Standards

U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute

The White House: ENSURING A NATIONAL POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

STDMi: OMB A119 & the NTAA: How ANSI accredited standards become federal law

ANSI Response to NIST “A Plan for Global Engagement on AI Standards”

On April 29, 2024 NIST released a draft plan for global engagement on AI standards.

Comments are due by June 2. More information is available here.

 

Request for Information Related to NIST’s Assignments

Under Sections 4.1, 4.5 and 11 of the Executive Order Concerning Artificial Intelligence 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology seeks information to assist in carrying out several of its responsibilities under the Executive order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence issued on October 30, 2023. Among other things, the E.O. directs NIST to undertake an initiative for evaluating and auditing capabilities relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and to develop a variety of guidelines, including for conducting AI red-teaming tests to enable deployment of safe, secure, and trustworthy systems.

Regulations.GOV Filing: NIST-2023-0009-0001_content

Browse Posted Comments (72 as of February 2, 2024 | 12:00 EST)

Standards Michigan Public Comment

Attention Is All You Need | Authors: Ashish Vaswani et al. (2017).  This groundbreaking paper introduced the Transformer architecture, replacing recurrent layers with self-attention mechanisms to enable parallelizable, efficient sequence modeling. It laid the foundational blueprint for all subsequent LLMs, revolutionizing natural language processing by capturing long-range dependencies without sequential processing.
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding | Authors: Jacob Devlin et al. (2018). BERT pioneered bidirectional pre-training via masked language modeling, allowing models to understand context from both directions. As an encoder-only Transformer, it achieved state-of-the-art results on 11 NLP tasks and established the pre-training/fine-tuning paradigm that underpins bidirectional LLMs like those in search and classification.
Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models | Authors: Jordan Hoffmann et al. (2022).  Known as the Chinchilla paper, it revealed that optimal LLM performance requires balanced scaling of model size and data volume (e.g., 70B parameters trained on 1.4T tokens outperform larger models with less data). This shifted research toward data-efficient training, influencing efficient LLM development.


Unleashing American Innovation

Federal Agency Conformity Assessment

Time & Frequency Services

Technical Requirements for Weighing & Measuring Devices

Why You Need Standards

Summer Internship Research Fellowship

A Study of Children’s Password Practices

Human Factors Using Elevators in Emergency Evacuation

Cloud Computing Paradigm

What is time?

Readings / Radio Controlled Clocks

Standard Reference Material

Furniture

CLICK ON IMAGE

Standard Reference Material

Metrology is the scientific discipline that deals with measurement, including both the theoretical and practical aspects of measurement. It is a broad field that encompasses many different areas, including length, mass, time, temperature, and electrical and optical measurements.  The goal of metrology is to establish a system of measurement that is accurate, reliable, and consistent. This involves the development of standards and calibration methods that enable precise and traceable measurements to be made.

The International System of Units is the most widely used system of units today and is based on a set of seven base units, which are defined in terms of physical constants or other fundamental quantities.  Another important aspect of metrology is the development and use of measurement instruments and techniques. These instruments and techniques must be designed to minimize errors and uncertainties in measurements, and they must be calibrated against recognized standards to ensure accuracy and traceability.

Metrology also involves the development of statistical methods for analyzing and interpreting measurement data. These methods are used to quantify the uncertainty associated with measurement results and to determine the reliability of those results.

National Institute for Standards & Technology

Federal Participation in Consensus Standards

ARCHIVE: UM Welcomes ANSI 2015

Pumpkin Pie

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”

– George Bernard Shaw

 

NIST Headquarters | Gaithersburg Maryland | Link to Standards Michigan coverage

Related:

Michigan State University: Pumpkin Pie filling from scratch

Iowa State University

Johnson & Wales College Rhode Island: Foolproof Pumpkin Pie

Technical Barriers to Trade

World According to Marco Polo

 

We track action in international administrative procedures that affect the safety and sustainability agenda of the education facility industry.  From time to time we find product purchasing contracts that contain “boilerplate” requiring conformity to applicable regulations found in the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT).   Common examples are found in contracts for the acquisition of information technology and specialty laboratory equipment.

The World Trade Organization TBT Agreement obliges all Parties  to maintain an inquiry point that is able to answer questions from interested parties and other WTO Members regarding technical regulations, standards developed by government bodies, and conformity assessment procedures, as well as provide relevant documents.  The TBT Agreement also requires that WTO Members notify the WTO of proposed technical regulations and conformity assessment procedures so interested parties can become acquainted with them and have an opportunity to submit written comments.

Technical Barriers to Trade Information Management System

The inquiry point and notification authority for the United States is operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce.  We provide a link here for the convenience of faculty, specifiers and purchasing professionals.

Notify U.S. Standards Coordination Office USA WTO Enquiry Point

We include the TBT on the agenda of our Hello World! colloquium; open to everyone.  See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting.

 


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