The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has instigated an initiative called Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), with the aim to advance innovative computational thinking.
The NSF hopes that CDI research will change our understanding of a wide range of science and engineering phenomena and socio-technical innovations that could change our quality of life.
Funding for this first project will range from $26m to $52m in 2008, and is expected to increase by $50m in each of the next five years. It is hoped the investment will attract researchers from many different disciplines to make use of cutting-edge computational concepts, methods, models, and algorithms to provide new angles for scientific and engineering research.