In the summer of 2005, an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.

The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements necessary to accelerate scientific advances –particularly those driven by computational sciences and the ‘new kinds’ of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.

We hope Towards 2020 Science will act as a ‘pathfinder’ to new research directions in science and computing. We also hope that it will contribute to, and inform, national and international scientific debate and science policy. It is also just a start, a catalyst for more discussion, so lastly, we hope that you will find it useful, inspiring and provocative.

Short term, I always favor political prediction markets over political expert groups —for other topics, I need to see whether there’s market liquidity. Long term, alas, except for a bunch of Foresight Exchange contracts, there is no match for expert groups’ analysis and prognosis.