The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has recently called for the creation of the Nanotechnology Research Institute (NRI) which will be dedicated to creating new ideas and demonstrating feasibility for novel electronic switching devices with associated memory and interconnects by the year 2020. The proposed institute will be a joint effort by industry, academia and government involving university faculty and students working with industrial assignees working in state of the art facilities located on or adjacent to university campuses. Funding would come from a partnership between government and industry. This paper will give the latest information on the research program and organizational structure of the NRI. In general, the NRI will address the scientific and engineering aspects of classical information processing at nanometer scale lengths, fempto second time scales and atto Joule energies. It will consider devices and architectures that rely on state variables other than electronic charge such as spin, phase, photons, dipole orientation, magnetic flux quanta, orbital symmetries and other non-stander state variables. It will consider novel architectures that rely on nearest neighbor data flows and novel data representations that may rely on associative data structures. It will seek to understand the relationship between information and entropy and many other advanced concepts that are vital to future scaling.