NSF Grants Cornell $10 M for New Institute
Could a computer model help stabilize the tuna population? Can we compute how to transition to ethanol fuel without jeopardizing food production?
Those and other questions will be tackled by computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists, and environmental scientists affiliated with Cornell University's new Institute for Computational Sustainability, being launched with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), according to a Sept. 4 press release.
This program is designed to pursue "far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society."
Directed by Carla Gomes, Cornell professor of computing and information science, the institute will involve 14 Cornell faculty members along with scientists at Oregon State University, Howard University, Bowdoin College, the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the Conservation Fund.
?
Many of today's problems in ecology and conservation involve juggling large numbers of variables, often to find the optimum way to balance them. Some are so complex, the researchers say, that they will require new advances in computer science. Gomes and her team hope to create a new field of computational sustainability that will stimulate new developments in the computer science areas of constraint optimization, dynamical systems, and machine learning. The researchers also are launching the Journal of Computational Sustainability.
The institute will collaborate extensively with the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future and a number of other sustainability programs on campus. But, said Gomes, "Our mission is to extend beyond the initial members of the institute, including graduate and undergraduate students in the Cornell community in other disciplines. If there is someone who has a nice computational problem about wind turbines or solar energy, for example, we want to collaborate with and help support them."