Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation is a five-year initiative to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes using innovations and advances in computational thinking. Image courtesy of Jef Bettens

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation Program is seeking ambitious, transformative, multidisciplinary research proposals within or across the following three thematic areas:

• From Data to Knowledge: enhancing human cognition and generating new knowledge from a wealth of heterogeneous digital data;
• Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built and Social Systems: deriving fundamental insights on systems comprising multiple interacting elements; and
• Building Virtual Organizations: enhancing discovery and innovation by bringing people and resources together across institutional, geographical and cultural boundaries.

Computational thinking is defined comprehensively to encompass computational concepts, methods, models, algorithms and tools.

A competitive CDI proposal will:

• Describe an ambitious research and/or education agenda that, through computational thinking, promises paradigm-shifting advances in more than one field of science or engineering;
• Provide a compelling rationale for how innovations in, and/or innovative use of, computational thinking will yield the desired project outcomes; and,
• Draw on productive intellectual partnerships that capitalize upon knowledge and expertise synergies in multiple fields or sub-fields of science or engineering and/or in multiple types of organizations, including academic, for-profit and not-for-profit entities, both foreign and domestic.