, focuses on the newly emerging field of Computational Sustainability
and aims to apply computational techniques to help solve some of the most challenging sustainability
problems of our time
.
Its vision is that computer scientists can — and should — play a key role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness in the way we manage and allocate our natural resources, while enriching and transforming Computer Science. The institute, headed by Carla Gomes, is a joint venture involving scientists from Cornell University
, Bowdoin College
, the Conservation Fund, Howard University
, Oregon State University
, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
.
Research team
The institute's research team is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together computer scientists, biologists, environmental scientists, biological and environmental engineers, mathematicians, and economists from 7 different colleges, in 12 different departments. The team is led by:- Carla P. Gomes, Cornell University (Director ICS)
- David Shmoys, Cornell University (Associate Director ICS)
- Thomas Dietterich, Oregon State University (Deputy Director ICS (OSU))
- Mary Lou Zeeman, Bowdoin College (Deputy Director ICS (Bowdoin))
Expedition goals
The NSF Expeditions in Computing grant supporting ICS has the following goals:- To inject Computational Thinking into Sustainability that will provide:
- new insights into sustainability questions;
- new challenges and new methodologies in Computer Science (analogous to Computational Biology).
- To establish a new field, Computational Sustainability:
- Focused on computational methods for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future.
- To establish the Institute for Computational Sustainability (ICS) in order to:
- Perform and foster research in Computational Sustainability
- Establish a vibrant research community, reaching far beyond the participating members of this Expedition.
NSF support
The National Science Foundationannounced in 2008 that it has established a five year program to support research in the field of computational sustainability. Quoting from their Press Release 08-141:
August 18, 2008
The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science FoundationNational Science FoundationThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
(NSF) has established four new Expeditions in Computing. Each of these $10 million grants will allow teams of researchers and educators to pursue far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.
...
In the Expedition Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society, Carla Gomes and her colleagues at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, Bowdoin CollegeBowdoin CollegeBowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...
, the Conservation Fund, Howard UniversityHoward UniversityHoward University is a federally chartered, non-profit, private, coeducational, nonsectarian, historically black university located in Washington, D.C., United States...
, Oregon State UniversityOregon State UniversityOregon State University is a coeducational, public research university located in Corvallis, Oregon, United States. The university offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees and a multitude of research opportunities. There are more than 200 academic degree programs offered through the...
and the Pacific Northwest National LaboratoryPacific Northwest National LaboratoryPacific Northwest National Laboratory is one of the United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, managed by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. The main campus of the laboratory is in Richland, Washington....
will explore the development and application of computational methods to enable a sustainable environment, economy and society. By tackling challenges that have not traditionally been addressed by computational approaches, Gomes and her team hope to create a new field of computational sustainability--much like computational biology has arisen in past decades--that will stimulate new research synergies across the areas of constraint optimization, dynamical systems, and machine learning. The research team is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists.
Related Organizations
- http://www.computational-sustainability.org