ACM TechNews

Cornell Gets $10 Million Federal Grant to Establish New Institute Applying Computing to Sustainability

Cornell University (09/03/08) Steele, Bill

Cornell University's new Institute for Computational Sustainability will use a $10 million National Science Foundation grant to pursue far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in computing that will greatly benefit society. "Our vision is that computing and information science can--and should--play a key role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the way we manage and allocate our natural resources," says Cornell professor and institute director Carla Gomes. She says that many of today's problems in ecology and conservation involve juggling large numbers of variables and finding the best way to balance those variables. Some problems are so complex that they will require significant advancements in computer science, researchers say. Gomes says the institute will create a new field of computational sustainability, similar to computational biology, which will stimulate developments in the computer science areas of constraint optimization, dynamical systems, and machine learning. The institute will work with the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future and a variety of other sustainability programs on campus, but Gomes says the institute's goal is to extend beyond the initial members of the institute, and to help organizations with computational problems that could benefit other fields.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept08/compSustain.ws.html

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