The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure: 2021 Update, which surveys a comprehensive set of earlier intelligent infrastructure whitepapers from 2017 and a more recent set of companion Quadrennial whitepapers on closely related topics. The update then highlights four themes of rising national prominence where intelligent infrastructure can play an enabling role. 

Examples of how intelligent infrastructure can have an impact include:

• COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters: Intelligent infrastructure such as GIS dashboards, computational simulations, cloud computing, and broadband helped virus monitoring, policy-intervention comparisons, tele-work, tele-education, and  tele-health. New opportunities include National Pandemic Informatics Infrastructure to monitor virus mutations, as well as emergency informatics for responding to and recovering from large disasters. 
• Sustainability and energy efficiency: IoT, Cyber-Physical systems and Physics-aware AI are reducing energy usage. New opportunities include Geo-dashboards monitoring our changing planet for early warning of unsustainable trends. 
• Job recovery and employment opportunities: Intelligent infrastructure companies are creating many jobs. New opportunities including “re-tooling” workers to enhance productivity, job safety and satisfaction in future careers.
• Advancement of social justice: Body-worn video cameras advanced social justice. New opportunities include universal broadband access along with environmental sensors and spatio-temporal dashboards monitoring air quality and critical infrastructure access. 

For each of these themes and their resulting challenges to our society, intelligent infrastructure can provide keys to finding the necessary solutions. Enabling those technologies effectively will require investment in the associated computing research as well, beyond, and in concert with the basic building projects. 

Some of this research can be resourced through current programs such as NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities in conjunction with the MetroLab Network spanning numerous cities, counties, local governments and universities. However, existing programs provide only modest investments in basic research and are not of a sufficient scale to support the broad, national transition we must make to achieve the full benefits of intelligent infrastructure. Any such effort must leverage our world-class universities via Federal funding of basic research and development to invent, deploy, and evaluate the necessary new technologies, to participate in the all-important discussions of policies and ethics, and to train the intelligent infrastructure workforce of the future.

See the white paper and all the 2020 Quadrennial whitepapers to learn more.