The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the formation of a new collaboration, supported through the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, to construct a human capacity building infrastructure that extends the cyberinfrastructure community to include a much larger number of talented and diverse people. The collaboration, "Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure," or EPIC, includes K-12 teachers, university researchers, leaders of organizations focused on diversity, and tool builders from across the country focused on interlinked and coordinated projects that will significantly increase the diversity and number of people that are learning about and applying cyberinfrastructure to address their research and educational needs.
"The strength and beauty of EPIC is the diversity and commitment of its partners," said Roscoe Giles, Boston University, who is the co-principle investigator for EPIC, along with Greg Moses of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Our partners include K-12 educators, students, researchers, and members of groups who are leading national efforts to increase diversity within the cyberinfrastructure."
The NSF's programs have seen recent and substantial improvements in their focus on the individuals involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Several directorates within the NSF have added programs to increase the number of people involved in STEM research and education, and to improve the environment for all participants in those areas. One significant program, "Education, Outreach, and Training Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, " or EOT-PACI (http://www.eot.org), was a partnership of dozens of institutions and organizations throughout the nation, led by the National Computational Science Alliance (http://www.ncsa.edu) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (http://www.npaci.edu), which received NSF support from 1997- 2004. During the course of its tenure, an external evaluation showed that 50,000 people had benefited from EOT-PACI.
