August 9, 2018

Dear Colleagues:

Through this Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) wishes to alert the CISE community about forthcoming changes to the CISE Research Infrastructure (CRI) program.

CISE is in the process of revising the CRI program to focus exclusively on infrastructure that engages emerging communities of CISE researchers in order to move CISE research frontiers forward. In the future, the program will aim to support testbeds, platforms, datasets, etc., coupled with a supporting suite of tools, resources, and user services to enable innovative research by diverse communities of CISE researchers.

As part of this change, CISE will be discontinuing support for the Institutional Infrastructure class of awards. Funding for institutional infrastructure will continue to be available through other NSF programs that support infrastructure, including the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program. CISE researchers may also wish to consider embedding modest equipment requests within their CISE research proposals.

Further information about the program will be available once the revised solicitation is released. A series of webinars will provide information about the new program and program officers to contact with questions. Please see the CISE website (https://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=CISE) for information about upcoming webinars on the new program.

CISE is excited about the potential for the refocused program to offer opportunities for developing significant infrastructure resources to support CISE research communities and to enable transformative research agendas not possible with infrastructure currently available to the CISE research community.

Questions about this DCL should be directed to Harriet Taylor (htaylor@nsf.gov), lead program director for the CRI program.

Sincerely,

Erwin Gianchandani
Acting Assistant Director, CISE