Questions about NSF’s new $52 million Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation initiative? The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting a “Brown Bag” discussion on the topic with CDI program director Sirin Tekinay on Thursday, November 8th, at noon ET. You can submit your questions now and Sirin will join the discussion on Thursday with answers.
As we’ve mentioned previously, the CDI initiative is a cross-Foundation initiative aimed at “[broadening] the Nation’s capability for innovation by developing a new generation of computationally based discovery concepts and tools to deal with complex, data-rich and interacting systems.” The $52 million initiative* will be led by CISE (which will control about $20 million), with participation from Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Science, Social, Behavioral and Economic science, Cyberinfrastructure, International Science, and EHR. NSF hopes to grow the program in successive budget years up to $250 million in 2012, with CISE controlling a proportional share. So this is potentially a very big deal.
Tune in to the chat on Thursday and learn more!
* NSF requested $52 million for the program in FY 08, and Congressional appropriators have included full funding for the program in their as-yet-unpassed appropriations bills. However, the Chronicle describes CDI as a $26 million program and I’m not sure where that number came from. In any case, the final total for FY 08 won’t be known until Congress and the President sort out the mess that FY 08 appropriations has become….