Cornell gets $10 million NSF grant to establish new sustainability...( Could a computer model help stabiliz...)

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). 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.

"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," Gomes said.

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, analogous to computational biology, that will stimulate new developments in the computer science areas of constraint optimization, dynamical systems and machine learning. The researchers are also launching a new 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, includ
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