II-EN: Computing research infrastructure for constraint optimization, machine learning, and dynamical models for computational sustainability

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

II-EN: Computing research infrastructure for constraint optimization, machine learning, and dynamical models for Computational Sustainability High performance computing infrastructure will be acquired to support the research, outreach, and educational activities of researchers engaged by the Institute for Computational Sustainability (ICS) in a number of research projects which have significant computational needs. Computational sustainability is a new interdisciplinary field that aims to apply techniques from computer science, applied mathematics and related disciplines to help the balancing of environmental, economic, and societal needs for sustainable development. Computational sustainability research brings together computational sciences and a variety of other disciplines to focus on developing computational models, methods, and tools for supporting the design of sustainable policies, practices, products, and tools. ICS has established a number of significant research projects in areas ranging from biodiversity conservation, to natural resource management, poverty mapping, and material discovery for fuel cell technology. Computational sustainability research is already leading to foundational contributions in several areas of Computer Science. Computational Sustainability presents decision and optimization problems with a mixture of continuous and discrete variables in highly dynamic and uncertain environments, pushing the boundaries of the current state-of-the art of computer science. ICS research focuses on integrating techniques from constraint reasoning, optimization, dynamical systems, machine learning, and data mining, in order to obtain effective dynamic decision theoretic models to address sustainability problems. The computing infrastructure requested would allow ICS researchers including 21 faculty, 53 students (including 24 undergraduates), and over a 100 collaborators to scale up their work to larger problems than they would have been otherwise be able to solve. ICS research has direct impacts on policy makers and practitioners engaged in sustainability work. For example, working in collaboration with the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell, ICS researchers have provided computational analysis for the U.S. Department of the Interior's 2011 State of the Birds report. In collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service, ICS research is improving the design of wildlife corridors for species such as grizzly bears, wolverines, and lynx. ICS is working with The Conservation Fund to develop conservation plans that will be used by government and conservation agencies. In collaboration with the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute, ICS members are developing automated tools to support the discovery of new materials for fuel cell technology. ICS is also building a vibrant computational sustainability research community through conferences, workshops, lectures, and online discussions. Combined with ICS education and outreach activities, these research efforts promote teaching, training, and the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science. Additional information regarding the ICS and its efforts to meet the critical societal, environmental, and economic needs for knowledge, methods, and tools that advance computational sustainability efforts can be found at the ICS website: www.cis.cornell.edu/ics