Thursday, March 29, 2007

New NSF report on Cyberinfrastructure

This report from the National Science Foundation should be required reading at SIS.
The five chapters of this document set out NSF’s cyberinfrastructure vision. The first, A Call for Action, presents NSF’s vision and commitment to a cyberinfrastructure initiative. NSF will play a leadership role in the development and support of a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure essential to 21st century advances in science and engineering research and education. The vision focuses on a time frame of 2006-2010. The mission is for cyberinfrastructure to be human-centered, world-class, supportive of broadened participation in science and engineering, sustainable, and stable but extensible. The guiding principles are that investments will be science-driven, recognize the uniqueness of NSF’s role, provide for inclusive strategic planning, enable U.S. leadership in science and engineering, promote partnerships and integration with investments made by others in all sectors, both national and international, and rely on strong merit review and on-going assessment, and a collaborative governance culture. This chapter goes on to review a set of more specific goals and strategies for NSF’s cyberinfrastructure initiative along with brief descriptions of the strategy to achieve those goals.


The five chapters focus on the following four areas and include a "Call to Action":

  1. High Performance Computing
  2. Data, Data Analysis and Visualization
  3. Virtual Organizations for Digital Communities
  4. Learning and Workforce Development

Next September we will have the opportunity to reconsider the Research Interest Groups that we have. I think that it would be useful for us to perform that reevaluation in light of this report, considering that NSF is one of the major funders of the information sciences.

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