Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation

The National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research program was (IMHO) one of the most successful efforts to support interdisciplinary research in computational science. (The Department of Energy's SciDAC program does well too.) Thus it has been a great concern that this program was terminated with no clear next step.

The new Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program, announced as beginning in 2008, seems to be a worthy successor. Five key elements:

• Knowledge extraction
• Interacting elements
• Computational experimentation
• Virtual environments
• Educating researchers and students in computational discovery