Two weeks ago I attended the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) symposium on “Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs.”

The invited talks and panels, which were live streamed, are now available on video.

The morning session of the first day was on “Computing in the Physical World” and was opened with a keynote presentation by CompSustNet Director, Carla Gomes. Carla’s talk covered the growth of computational sustainability as a field, and spotlighted the participants and research thrusts of CompSustNet as the most recent addition to that history.

The sustainability challenges are many — protecting biodiversity, citizen science, materials discovery, poverty mitigation, as are the computational approaches implicated by these challenges, to include include dynamical systems, uncertainty, big data, and prediction.

One of Carla’s major points was that computational approaches of broad applicability can emerge by addressing sustainability challenges. In this talk she gives a compelling example of how streamlining constraint reasoning arose from addressing a problem of fertilizer distribution.

The online talk, which is second of the video presentations and includes accompanying slides, and CompSustNet website give many more details.

Talks that followed Carla’s in the Monday morning session are also in the computational sustainability fold, and my twitter feed shows quite a few gems (@DougOfNashville #cccsymposium).  The morning session agenda was as follows.

Keynote – Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for Sustainable Development by Carla Gomes, Professor and Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University

Short Talks and Panel Discussion- Opportunities in Urban Environments (Smart Cities)

• Sokwoo Rhee, National Institute of Standards and Technology – Internet of Things and Smart Cities
• Carter Hewgley, Johns Hopkins University, Center for Government Excellence- Converting Insight into Action
• Charlie Catlett, Argonne National Laboratory and the Computation Institute – Open Data and Instrumented Cities

Short Talks and Panel Discussion- Opportunities in Agriculture, Environment, Disaster, Food-Energy-Water

• Sonny Ramaswamy, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) – Societal Challenges and Nutritional Security: The Role of Cyberphysical Systems and Big Data
• Shashi Shekhar, University of Minnesota – Computing Challenges in Food, Energy, and Water Nexus: A Perspective
• Robin Murphy, Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) and the Center for Emergency Informatics and Texas A&M University – Computing for Disasters

In addition to the plenary talks and panels, poster summaries are also online, to include a poster on Computational Sustainability by CompSustNet Executive Council member, Bistra Dilkina, of Georgia Tech.

The CCC is an office of the Computing Research Association (CRA), and CCC/CRA hosted an earlier visioning workshop on the Role of Information Sciences and Engineering for Sustainability, as well as workshops in many other areas. In fact, this most recent symposium was something of an overview of selected earlier workshops, to include those on privacy and healthcare, as well as sustainability.

Douglas H. Fisher is CompSustNet’s Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis. The opinions expressed herein are Doug’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. Contact Doug at douglas.h.fisher@vanderbilt.edu.

Earlier this week, CompSustNet Director, Carla Gomes, announced the CompSust-2016: The 4th International Conference on Computational Sustainability.

          CompSust-2016 @ Cornell
          4th International Conference on Computational Sustainability

          Correct Important Dates

          Abstract submission -May 21, 2016
          Doctoral consortium application – May 21, 2016
          Notification of acceptance May 27, 2016
          Early registration deadline June 3, 2016 (5pm EDT)
          Conference July 6-8, 2016

          For more information check the conference website:

          http://www.compsust.net/compsust-2016/

          Hope to see you there,

         –Carla

        Carla P. Gomes
        Conference Co-Chair

You can find the list of past CompSust conferences at the bottom of the 2016 conference website. I attended the first CompSust conference in 2009, very probably the most exciting and interesting conference I have attended since my graduate student days, when all things were new. I am reposting my somewhat rambling recollections of that first CompSust conference, both when I touched down at Ithaca airport prior to the conference and as I left the same airport after the conference, on my personal blog.

In addition to dedicated conferences on computational sustainability, equally important outlets for computational sustainability research are established, mainstream conferences on artificial intelligence, such as AAA-16, which will be a topic of posts in the near future.

Douglas H. Fisher is CompSustNet’s Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis. The opinions expressed herein are Doug’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. Contact Doug at douglas.h.fisher@vanderbilt.edu.

There is sad news that computer scientist and energy policy expert David J.C. MacKay passed away on April 14.  Professor Sir MacKay was knighted earlier this year.

In computer science Professor MacKay is known for his work on information theory, signal correction, machine learning, and assistive software.

In 2008 he published “Sustainable Energy — without the hot air” in which he analyzes the UK’s ability to operate on renewable energy sources only.  This is a self-published, freely-downloadable book that is also a highly-praised — not characteristics one often sees in one book! Bill Gates says of it,

“…this is one of the best books on energy that has been written. If someone is going to read just one book I would recommend this one. It isn’t an easy read but that’s because you learn so much. Even after you read this book you will want to keep it around since whenever you read about a new development in energy technology, the framework in this book will help you understand how important it is and where it fits in.”

A 10-page synopsis of the book is available.

I am not intimately familiar with Professor MacKay’s work in computer science and related fields, but it appears that his research in these areas was, on the surface, independent from his work on energy policy. Underpinning both, however, is a sharp analytical and computational approach. David MacKay spoke at UAI 2015 on climate change, and at ICML 2012 on “Information Theory and Sustainable Energy”. This latter talk, in particular, may reveal his synthesis of his two areas of broad expertise. The video of the talk is not viewable at time of writing this post, but I will back edit with a link to a functioning video if and when I find it.

At times like this I am reminded of Turing Award winner Judea Pearl’s injunction to put human faces to science, and I will be doing that when I cover Sir David MacKay’s research in my computational sustainability course this Fall. Professor Sir David MacKay has left us with an impressive legacy of science and service at their very best.

Douglas H. Fisher is CompSustNet’s Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis. The opinions expressed herein are Doug’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. Contact Doug at douglas.h.fisher@vanderbilt.edu.

CompSustNet is a network of researchers who are developing new computational approaches to addressing challenges in environmental and societal sustainability. In my role as CompSustNet’s Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis, I plan to blog regularly about each of the topics indicated in my title, as well as posting publicly-accessible overviews of the research being undertaken in the network. For this latter area of responsibility, in particular, I will also recruit graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in communicating science and technology to the public, as fellow bloggers and co-authors of articles. Contact me if you are interested.

Because registration at most schools for Fall 2016 courses is starting soon, or is very recently underway, higher education in computational sustainability is a timely topic.

In the last 5 years or so there have been a number of college-level courses in computational sustainability, some with an emphasis in one subarea, but most with broader coverage. Here is a list of the courses that I know.

• Sustainability and Assistive Computing (Bryn Mawr, Fall 2010). Broad coverage, with a large proportion of course dedicated to computing for societally important topics other than sustainability per se.
• Computing and the Environment (Vanderbilt, Spring 2011). Broad coverage, for upper-division CS students, with programming prerequisites and some mathematical sophistication.
• Computational Methods in Sustainable Energy (Carnegie Mellon, Fall 2012). Graduate course, with focus implied by name.
• Computational Sustainability (U British Columbia, Winter 2013-2014). Graduate seminar, with broad coverage of computational sustainability topics.
• Computational Sustainability (Georgia Tech, Spring 2014). A broad coverage of computational sustainability topics, with knowledge of calculus and probability theory required.
• Seminar on Computational Sustainability: Algorithms for Ecology and Conservation (UMass Amherst, Spring 2014). Graduate seminar, with a focus implied by name.
• Topics in Computational Sustainability (Stanford, Spring 2016).  A broad coverage of computational sustainability topics, with no formal prerequisites, but some mathematical and programming sophistication required.

Beyond the topics themselves, at least two things strike me as notable about these courses.

• Instructors openly use and acknowledge educational content from other courses and other instructors, in addition to making nontrivial use of guest lecturers. As I plan for my Fall 2016 special topics course, entitled Computing, the Environment, and Energy, I will be using much from my earlier 2011 course, but I will also undoubtedly take Stefano Ermon (Stanford) and Dan Sheldon (UMass) up on their offers to share resources. I’ll consider drawing from other courses as well, and I expect to line up a few guest lectures over video conferencing as well.
• These are not courses that fit the stereotype of “computing and society” or “computing and ethics” that require little or no computing background. Such introductory courses would be a good addition to the course portfolio, but consistent with the CompSustNet mission, the courses so far have opted to advance the education of committed and knowledgeable computer science students.

In the future, I will be posting more on computing courses, including my own Fall 2016 course. I invite others to contribute one or more posts on their experiences too. In addition to standalone courses in computational sustainability, I will be posting on “deep infusion of sustainability material into NON-sustainability-themed courses”.  Deep infusion doesn’t seek to spinoff computational sustainability to specialized courses, but seeks to make it ubiquitous across the entire computing curriculum.

Douglas H. Fisher is CompSustNet’s Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis. The opinions expressed herein are Doug’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. Contact Doug at douglas.h.fisher@vanderbilt.edu.

Poverty, saving species, repowering the world with renewable energy, lifting people up to live better lives—there are no easy answers to guiding our planet on the path toward sustainability. Complex problems require sophisticated solutions. They involve intricacy beyond human capabilities, the kind of big-data processing and analysis that only advanced large-scale computing can provide. CompSustNet, funded by an NSF Expedition in Computing award, is a vast research network powered by the nation’s top university computer science programs, charged with applying the emerging field of computational sustainability to solving the world’s seemingly unsolvable resource problems. Put simply, the project enlists some of the top talents in computing, social science, conservation, physics, materials science, and engineering to unlock sustainable solutions that safeguard our planet’s future.

Computational Sustainability is, at its core, the belief that with sufficiently advanced computational techniques, we can devise sustainable solutions that help meet the environmental, societal, and economic needs of today while providing for future generations. In much the same way IBM’s supercomputer Watson could defeat any challenger in Jeopardy!, computational sustainability posits that a computer-engineered solution can be applied to virtually any of the world’s problems—from helping farmers and herders in Africa survive severe droughts to developing a smart power grid fueled entirely by renewable energy. CompSustNet is a large national and international multi-institutional research network led by Cornell University and including 11 other US academic institutions: Bowdoin, Caltech, CMU, Georgia Tech, Howard University, Oregon State, Princeton, Stanford, UMass, University of South California, and Vanderbilt University, as well as collaborations with several international universities. But CompSustNet is not just an ivory-tower enterprise, as it also includes key governmental and non-governmental organizations that specialize in conservation, poverty mitigation, and renewable energy, such as The Nature Conservancy, The World Wildlife Fund, The International Livestock Research Institute, The Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

CompSustNet’s core mission is to significantly expand the horizons of computational sustainability and foster the advancement of state-of-the-art computer science to achieve the scale to tackle global problems. Research will focus on cross-cutting computational topics such as optimization, dynamical models, simulation, big data, machine learning, and citizen science, applied to sustainability challenges.  For example, computational sustainability is being put to work to resolve the problem of providing wetlands for shorebirds that migrate from the Arctic through California during a time of drought. As California gets drier, the shorebirds have nowhere to stop, rest, and refuel by eating wetland invertebrates. Scientists are developing new dynamic precision conservation techniques that use complex, big-data models to tackle the problem with NASA satellite imagery, meteorological forecasts, and citizen science in the form of thousands of bird location sightings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird checklisting app for birdwatchers. Through partnership with The Nature Conservancy, the program forecasts when and where wetland habitat would be needed for shorebirds, and the Conservancy pays Central Valley rice farmers to flood their fields at opportune times—providing benefits for birds and farmers at a time when extreme drought is making life tough for both. In similar ways, computational sustainability projects will also be hard at work innovating automated monitoring networks to protect endangered elephant population from poachers, promoting the discovery of novel ways to harvest energy from sun light, and generating algorithms to manage the generation and storage of renewable energy in the power grid.

Advancements in computational sustainability will lead to novel, low-cost, high-efficiency strategies for saving endangered species, helping indigenous peoples improve their way of life, and scaling renewables up to meet 21st century energy demand. CompSustNet is like the seed, the venture capital, to help the field of computational sustainability achieve what’s possible.

The research leadership and contacts from all institutions are listed on the CompSustNet website.

In January 2016, the National Science Foundation announced the $10 million, 5-year Expeditions of Computing award for CompSustNet, to support a research network in computational sustainability led by Cornell University, and including Oregon State University, Bowdoin College, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Southern California, and Vanderbilt University.

CompSustNet is “a transformative computational sustainability network, bringing together computer scientists, environmental and social scientists, biologists, physicists and material scientists to expand the nascent field of computational sustainability,” says Carla Gomes, the Principle Investigator on the lead Cornell award.

This is the second Expeditions of Computing award led by Gomes on Computational Sustainability, a testament to how important it is that computer scientists and researchers in related disciplines take up the challenges of environmental and societal sustainability.

In addition to the funded network nodes referenced above, there are many other collaborating network members from the United States and across the world.

• Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) – Land and Water Flagship
• Data61 (formerly NICTA), Australia
• Delft University of Technology, Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory (TAHMO)
• Distributed Sun LLC
• Earth Networks Inc.
• International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) – Materials Measurement Laboratory
• Nature Trust of British Columbia
• Northwest Watershed Research Center
• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ)
• Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
• Technical University of Dortmund
• Technical University of Lisbon
• The Nature Conservancy (TNC)
• United States Geological Survey – Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
• Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Instituto de Ecología Aplicada (ECOLAP)
• Università di Bologna
• University College Cork, Insight Centre for Data Analytics
• University of British Columbia
• University of British Columbia
• University of British Columbia,
• University of Idaho,
• University of Lleida – Artificial Intelligence Research Group
• University of Maryland
• University of Oxford
• University of Sydney
• University of Washington, Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST)
• USDA Forest Service – International Programs
• World Wildlife Fund (WWF)

The research leadership and contacts from all institutions are listed on the CompSustNet website.

In the coming weeks, months, and years, look here and to the CompSustNet website, for updates on CompSustNet activities, as well as for opportunities for participation with the network. Please tell us about computing research in computational sustainability, whether previously called by that name or not, and please tell us of efforts to effectively communicate computational sustainability research to the public.

Douglas H. Fisher is the Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis for CompSustNet, and is an associate professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University.

Twitter: @compsust #compsustnet

This week in Québec City the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference is being held and for the fourth year running there is a special track on Computational Sustainability. The range of talks look at ways to apply and extend ideas in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for solving complex problems in Electric Vehicle Management, Bird Tracking, Disease Mapping, Power Management and Urban Emergency Preparedness.

You can see the full abstracts for the talks from the whole conference including the CompSust track online here. Also, if you subscribe or have access to AI Magazine, the magazine publication for AAAI, you can see some high level articles in the next two issues on the range and depth of CompSust research.

If you have research in this area that you want to submit then you’re in luck, due to AAAI changing it’s schedule from summer to winter the next AAAI CompSust deadline is just five weeks away! (Abstract:Sep10, Paper:Sep15) (Ok, so it’s a good thing if you have something ready to submit.) Good luck!

If you’re attending the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS2013) conference this week in Lake Tahoe there is a workshop on Machine Learning for Sustainability with the latest research on applying Machine Learning methods to sustainability problems and how those problems bring challenges of complexity and scalability for the areas of prediction, modeling and control.

Day : Tuesday December 10, 2013
Location :  Harrah’s Glenbrook+Emerald
Scheduled Talks and Poster Sessions : https://sites.google.com/site/mlsustws/schedule

Some news for researchers in Computational Sustainability updated throughout the month. If you know of relevant news for researchers working at the intersection of Computer Science and Sustainability share it with us in the comments, on Google+ in the CompSust community, or join the CompSust mailing list.

• Workshop:  SustainIT 2013 – The Third IFIP Conference on Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability is an interdiscplinary conference between industry and academia to address topics both of the significant energy consumption of computing technology and as a potential actor in steering a more clever usage of energy resources.
  Deadline:  passed
  Time and Place: October 30-31, Palermo, Italy.
• Workshop:  The First Workshop on Machine Learning for Environmental Sustainability (EnvSustML 2013) is collocated with the Asian Machine Learning Conference and aims to bring machine learning and data mining researchers and experts in the environmental domain together to tackle challenges towards environmental sustainability
  Deadline: Sept 30, 2013
  Time and Place: November 13-15, 2013. Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
• Workshop: Machine Learning for Sustainability Workshop to be held during NIPS 2013.
  Deadline: passed
  Time and Place: Dec 9-10, 2013 (conference Dec 5-8) in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA