Cyber Enabled Discovery and Innovation | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Cyber Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) opportunity (NSF 10-506) is a National Science Foundation initiative designed to push science and engineering forward through major advances in computational thinking. NSF uses the term "computational thinking" in a broad way, covering not just computing hardware or software, but the underlying concepts, algorithms, models, methods, and tools that let researchers ask new questions and solve problems that were previously out of reach. The overall goal is transformative, high-risk, high-reward work that can lead to true paradigm shifts across many disciplines, along with socio-technical innovations that improve quality of life and contribute to economic growth.

CDI specifically targets bold, multidisciplinary proposals that fit within or span three major thematic areas. The first theme, "From Data to Knowledge," focuses on turning massive, diverse, and often messy digital data into insight, including approaches that enhance human cognition and decision-making. The second, "Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems," emphasizes gaining fundamental understanding of systems made up of many interacting parts, including systems that are stochastic, chaotic, or otherwise difficult to predict. The third, "Virtual Organizations," aims to accelerate discovery by improving the ways people, tools, data, and infrastructure can be connected across institutions, geography, and cultures, effectively making collaboration itself a driver of scientific breakthroughs. Across all three themes, NSF is looking for proposals where computation is not just a support tool, but a central enabler of new science and engineering.

In terms of the kinds of outcomes NSF expects, CDI projects are meant to do things like identify hidden patterns and structure in huge datasets, use modeling and simulation to deepen understanding in both natural and social sciences and engineering, and develop ways to abstract and predict complex systems across many scales. The solicitation highlights an unusually wide span of potential application domains, from sub-particle physics to galaxies, from subcellular biology to ecosystems and the biosphere, and from individual behavior to societal-scale dynamics. CDI also places real weight on education and workforce development, expecting projects to help train future scientists and engineers to create, use, and advance cyber resources, and to broaden participation in STEM through innovative, cyber-enabled research and collaboration models.

Collaboration is a major expectation rather than an optional add-on. NSF encourages teams that bring together complementary expertise and that build productive partnerships among academia, industry, and other organizations, including international collaborators when they strengthen the work. The solicitation notes that these partnerships can help identify the most compelling research challenges and speed the translation of discovery into innovation and societal impact. At the same time, it clarifies funding boundaries: NSF may support CDI-related participation by SBIR-eligible organizations through subawards, but other for-profit entities and international partners generally need to cover their own participation costs from non-NSF sources.

The FY2010 competition described two award sizes. Type I awards were intended for smaller, tightly integrated teams, roughly on the scale of summer support for two investigators with complementary expertise, support for two graduate students, and associated research costs like materials, supplies, and travel, over three years. Type II awards were designed for larger efforts, roughly comparable to summer support for three investigators, three graduate students, and one or two senior personnel such as postdoctoral researchers or staff, plus research expenses, over four years. A key requirement for Type II is that the collaboration must be genuinely integrative, meaning the combined result should be more than the sum of what each team member could achieve independently. NSF also indicated that in later years (depending on funds) it expected to add Type III awards for even larger multidisciplinary teams lasting up to five years, again with the strong expectation of deep integration across disciplines and roles.

From an administrative standpoint, this was a discretionary NSF grant program in the science and technology research and development category, with an estimated total funding level of $36 million and an expected 30 awards. It cut across many NSF directorates and offices (reflected in multiple CFDA listings spanning engineering, math and physical sciences, geosciences, computer and information science, biological sciences, social and economic sciences, education, polar programs, international science and engineering, and cyberinfrastructure). There was no cost sharing requirement. Eligibility was centered on U.S.-based accredited colleges and universities (including community colleges) submitting on behalf of their faculty, as well as certain U.S. non-profit, non-academic research and education organizations such as independent museums, observatories, research labs, and professional societies. The opportunity was posted in November 2009 and later archived, with proposal windows in early 2010 for Type I and Type II submissions.

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Next opportunity: Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems

Previous opportunity: Fundamental Research Program for Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers

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