Special planning projects:
Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI)

In Fall 2007, the National Science Foundation announced a major new initiative entitled Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), with very substantial funding and a short deadline for submission of grant proposals. This new program spans all the scientific areas supported by the NSF, and is intended to encourage research which is cross-disciplinary and highly innovative. As such it is a perfect match for the goals of the IMA. When the NSF asked its Mathematics Institutes to help get the word out about CDI and to facilitate the response from members of the mathematics community, the IMA decided to invite teams of researchers to visit the IMA, for the purpose of developing CDI grant proposals. So far four major teams have visited from the US and Europe. Each of these teams has brought together mathematical researchers with researchers from very different fields of science and engineering. The areas of the projects are all quite different from each other, but each seems to involve striking applications of mathematics, and this type of interaction should be the basis for significant progress. We hope to see many of our CDI visitors again as participants in future IMA programs.