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.