Computer and Information Science and Engineering

The National Science Foundation is funding investigator-initiated research and education in computing, communications, and information science and engineering under CFDA 47.070, Computer and Information Science and Engineering, with the most recent grant awards disbursed January 1, 2027.

This program sustains a large, active portfolio. Over 53,000 awards have been made since 1991, with $20.56 billion in combined federal dollars obligated. Award activity has been substantial but declining: the program awarded 2,061 grants in 2023, declining to 974 in 2026 and 12 through early January 2027. Project Grants constitute 99 percent of awards (52,631 total), with Cooperative Agreements representing the remainder. Funding is concentrated almost entirely within NSF: the National Science Foundation made 38,846 awards ($13.64 billion), with three major internal divisions—Information and Intelligent Systems (4,753 awards, $2.1 billion), Computer and Network Systems (4,133 awards, $2.01 billion), and Computing and Communication Foundations (3,708 awards, $1.61 billion)—capturing the plurality of activity.

Awarded grants span applied cyberinfrastructure, data management, AI-enabled systems, and workforce training. Recent awards exemplify this breadth: peer-mentored high-performance computing bootcamps for undergraduates at primarily undergraduate institutions ($300 thousand); cyberinfrastructure for rare earth element recovery from electronics supporting clean energy ($320 thousand); scalable workforce development for AI-enabled power grids ($200 thousand to $300 thousand per collaborative award); semantic dynamic analysis of multilingual code ($615 thousand); mixed-precision hardware-software co-design for physical AI ($394–405 thousand); quantum circuit error detection ($400 thousand); and a declarative data management system for multimodal video and document analysis ($999,997). Infrastructure and community initiatives include the EDUCELAB heritage science facility ($1.5 million cooperative agreement) and NSF AI Institute awards for optimization-enabled intelligent systems ($3 million cooperative agreement) and edge computing ($3 million cooperative agreement).

Recent grant opportunities remain open across the portfolio. The Foundations for Operating the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR-OC) solicitation (25-546, posted October 1, 2026) seeks to establish operational leadership for NAIRR, a public-private partnership connecting researchers to advanced computational platforms and AI models; eligible applicants include institutions of higher education, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations. The Science and Technology Centers: Integrative Partnerships program (24-594, posted September 30, 2026) supports exceptionally innovative, complex, large-scale research at the interfaces of disciplines, limited to U.S. research universities with doctoral degree-granting programs. The Data Science Corps program (24-560, posted September 15, 2026) engages undergraduate and graduate students in real-world data science implementation projects within communities and organizations. Multiple standing core research programs remain active, including CISE Core Programs (23-561), Security, Privacy, and Trust in Cyberspace (22-517), and CISE Research Initiation Initiative (23-576), each with rolling or annual deadlines supporting investigator-led projects at varying scales.