The final reports from the Cornell faculty task forces identify the next steps in nearly a decade of collaborative work aimed at making Cornell a leader in such areas as genomics and computing and information sciences.

In 1996, President Hunter Rawlings charged a task force to ensure that Cornell retain its position as a world-class research university. The group, led by Norman R. Scott, vice president for research and advanced studies, and John Hopcroft, dean of the College of Engineering, focused on physical sciences and engineering, and their relationship to the biological sciences.

The group identified three technology-related areas to focus on: advanced materials, genomics, and computing and information sciences, and submitted its recommendations in 1997. At the same time, a faculty-driven effort gave birth to the genomics initiative in 1997 to make the university a leader in applying the results of DNA sequencing. This evolved in 2002 into the New Life Sciences Initiative, integrating life sciences with physical, engineering and computational sciences.

In 1999 the Computing and Information Science Task Force issued "Cornell in the Information Age," seeking to make Cornell the first university to broadly integrate computing and information science into education, research and scholarship across the campus. This also led to the creation of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science. The task force was chaired by Professor Daniel Huttenlocher, then professor in computer science, later to receive a joint appointment with the Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Five years later, President Jeffrey Lehman added new impetus to the genomics and computing initiatives with "Life in the Age of the Genome" and "Wisdom in the Age of Digital Information." To these were added a third initiative, "Sustainability in the Age of Development."