This post is by Zimei Bian. See her bio and contact information below.

Poaching is the illegal hunting, killing, or capture of wildlife. Preyed on by both trophy hunters and those that seek to profit from their extraordinarily-priced body parts, animals playing critical roles in our ecosystem have been pushed to near-extinction in recent years as their populations have dropped to unsustainably low numbers. To get an idea of the extent of the problem, the Black rhino population has declined by 97.6% since 1960, and up to 35,000 African elephants were killed just last year. To learn more about the motivations and impact behind illegal poaching, watch “Last Days”, a short film by Oscar-winning director Kathyrn Bigelow (of Last Days of Ivory), below:

(“Last Days”, a short film by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow)

To combat this global poaching crisis, a team of researchers at the University of Southern California led by CompSustNet Associate Director Milind Tambe are adding artificial intelligence (AI) to the mix. While human patrols at wildlife protection agencies serve as the primary form of protection for endangered species, the large sizes of reserves and limited resources give illegal poachers a significant advantage in avoiding capture. Funded by the Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Tambe’s team is working on the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, or PAWS, to assist conservation agencies in optimizing patrol routes that cover areas where poachers are most likely to attack.

(PAWS visual model – credit to http://teamcore.usc.edu/people/feifang/crime)

Developed in 2013, PAWS builds a behavior model that aims to predict poaching activities by analyzing existing patrolling and poaching data while accounting for natural routes with the most animal traffic. The software then generates randomized patrol strategies in the form of route suggestions for rangers to cover the potential problem areas while avoiding predictable patterns, taking into consideration the protected area’s existing terrain to minimize time and energy consumption. As more data is collected, the information is fed back into the PAWS system, allowing the software to “learn” and improve its strategies. You can watch the official video for PAWS here:

(PAWS video – Winner of Best Application of Artificial Intelligence @ AAAI Video Competition 2016)

The PAWS software is currently being tested. A field test was conducted in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park in 2014, and the study was presented at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence this past February. In the meantime, check out this poaching infographic by the African Wildlife Foundation and learn more about this incredible application of computational sustainability here.

Stay tuned for the debrief on other exciting projects in the Computational Sustainability Network!

Zimei Bian is a Computer Science  undergraduate at Vanderbilt University with a special passion for interactive storytelling and using tech for social good. In her spare time, she enjoys internet cat pictures and story-driven video games. The opinions expressed herein are Zimei’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. You can reach Zimei at zimei.bian@vanderbilt.edu.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored yet another symposium with clear connections to computational sustainability — I summarized an earlier symposium on Computing Research: Addressing National Priorities and Societal Needs.

This most recent symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good was co-sponsored by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as well as the CCC. The videos of the talks and panels are online.

CompSustNet Deputy Director Thomas Dietterich and Associate Director Milind Tambe are featured on the panel on Environmental Sustainability.

• Short Talks and Panel – Environmental Sustainability
  Moderated by Greg Hager, Johns Hopkins University
• Tom Dietterich, Oregon State University – Understanding and Managing Ecosystems through Artificial Intelligence
• Reuben Sarkar, The U.S. Department of Energy – Getting SMARTer on Future Mobility and Energy
• Milind Tambe, University of Southern California – Green Security: How AI can help protect endangered wildlife, fish, forests
• Tanya Berger Wolf, University of Illinois at Chicago – Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Data Science for Ecology and Conservation

Tom Dietterich (at 2:30 minutes) categorizes computational sustainability projects by their focus on data collection, data interpretation, data integration, model fitting (through machine learning), policy optimization for decision making, and policy execution, with exemplar projects in each category. Milind Tambe (at 18:10 minutes) talks about game theory applied to protection of natural resources, notably the the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS), a focus of an upcoming post by Zimei Bian.

Other sessions are also relevant to CompSustNet, most notably the panel on Urban Computing.  All three speakers focused on transportation, a topic with good representation  in AAAI-16’s Computational Sustainability track too.

• Short Talks and Panel Discussion – Urban Computing
  Moderated by Amy Greenwald, Brown University
• Dan Hoffman, Montgomery County, Maryland – The Interface between People and Their Government
• Stephen Smith, Carnegie Mellon University – Smart Infrastructure for Urban Mobility
• Pascal van Hentenryck, University of Michigan – Reinventing Mobility with Artificial Intelligence

Dan Hoffman addresses policy and operational challenges of using autonomous public transportation (e.g., buses). Stephen Smith (at 10:00 minutes) describes a pilot project in Pittsburgh that uses adaptive and reactive software to control intersections with demonstrated benefits at reducing congestion, and reducing the consequences (e.g., CO2, time and monetary costs). Pascal van Hentenryck (at 20:30 minutes) describes a pilot project in Canberra Australia that uses a system of commuting hubs (i.e., park-and-rides) and on-demand public transportation, such as express buses and cabs, to reduce urban congestion as well.

Computational sustainability topics appear elsewhere in the symposium program, including Eric Horvitz’ keynote talk, in which he spotlights a number of areas, to include “precision agriculture” (at 22:15 minutes) and wildlife protection planning (24:15 minutes).

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.

My survey of selected papers in the Computational Sustainability track of AAAI-2016 will appear in the July/August Issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems, with an allowed preprint on my website available now.  The preprint includes links to the papers in the online proceedings.

The IEEE Intelligent Systems article surveys computational methods that aid in various aspects of human decision making, to include data collection; learning models from data; model-based reasoning and simulation; reactive decision making under existing-design constraints; and designing sustainable environments “from scratch”. These methods are applied to sustainability applications involving the natural environment; socio-economic dimensions of sustainability; transportation; and other human-built infrastructure.

In addition to briefly summarizing each of the eighteen papers of the Computational Sustainability track, I offer some meta-commentary on

• the potential rebound effects on the environment of computational applications (e.g., that result from making what are largely disfunctional traffic systems slightly more tolerable);
• tradeoffs between various design criteria (e.g., designing road networks for routine commuting and design for emergency evacuation); and
• being cautious about design criteria that are related to, but at a distance from, environmental impacts (e.g., energy cost savings versus energy use savings).

As editor of the Sustainability column of IEEE Intelligent Systems, I am on the lookout for guest columnists. If you have a computational sustainability topic that you would like to write up for a broad audience of computing professionals, please contact me … if I don’t contact you first! IEEE Intelligent Systems allows you to keep a preprint on your Website.

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 big investment for NSF, as are other NSF-funded sustainability-oriented centers and networks. Even as we further the depth and breadth of research within our own network, there are opportunities for understanding our place in the larger set of sustainability centers and networks, and building and exploiting relationships with them. These need not be tightly-coupled relationships, and probably will not be, at least not initially. Loosely-coupled interactions with other centers and networks include (a) trading wisdom and plans about managing big network/center operations, to include outreach and education plans (e.g., by attending other-center workshops); and (b) using our (CompSustNet’s) computational methods to analyze data that are generated by these other centers.

Large NSF-funded centers for which there are synergies with CompSustNet include those that attend to decision making and human behavior, the natural environment, energy efficiency, and materials. Indeed, large centers will typically cross some of these broad areas. The list below, with mission statements, may seem long, but its only a start.

• Transdisciplinary Research Network for Sustainable Climate Risk Management : “… SCRiM links a transdisciplinary team of scholars … to answer the question, “What are sustainable, scientifically sound, technologically feasible, economically efficient, and ethically defensible climate risk management strategies?”
• National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center : “The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) is dedicated to accelerating scientific discovery at the interface of human and ecological systems. We support new interdisciplinary collaborations that pursue data-driven solutions to pressing socio-environmental problems.”
• AirWaterGas: A NSF Sustainability Research Network : “AirWaterGas is a team of scientists, engineers, public health experts, educators, policy analysts, economists, and lawyers working together to address a single driving question: How can we better integrate information about the environmental, economic, and social tradeoffs of oil and gas development into policy guiding development and regulations governing development?”
• Water and Environmental Technology Center : “The mission is to develop methods/technologies to detect, understand, mitigate and/or control contaminants, including emerging contaminants of concern, that can adversely impact water quality and the environment. The vision of the WET Center is to minimize any potential adverse effects of contaminants on human health and/or the environment.”
• Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science : “To enable a radical reduction in energy consumption in electronic devices: Research to lead to fundamentally new science; Educate a diverse generation of scientists, engineers, and technicians; Promote the application of the Center’s research outcomes.”
• Center for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and the Environment : “The mission of CAICE is to transform our ability to accurately predict the impact of aerosols on climate and our environment by bringing real-world chemical complexity into the laboratory.”
• Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry : “Conduct curiosity-driven and use-inspired research to enhance the sustainable chemistry toolbox with new methods and new techniques that will advance the scientific enterprise and transform the next generation of products, while preparing students to become the next generation of green chemists.”
• Center for Sustainable Polymers : “The mission of the Center for Sustainable Polymers (CSP) is to transform how plastics are made and unmade through innovative research, engaging education, and diverse partnerships that together foster environmental stewardship.”
• The Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology : “We aim to understand, predict, and control the specific chemical and physical interactions between nanomaterial surfaces and living systems via a molecular level, chemistry-centered approach.” 

Some NSF centers may have little in common thematically with CompSustNet, but may nonetheless present opportunities for new applications of computational approaches.

• Mid-InfraRed Technologies for Health and the Environment
  “MIRTHE’s goal is to develop Mid-Infrared (λ – 3-30 µm) optical trace gas sensing systems based on new technologies such as quantum cascade lasers or quartz enhanced photo-acoustic spectroscopy, with the ability to detect minute amounts of chemicals found in the environment or atmosphere, emitted from spills, combustion, or natural sources, or exhaled.”

There are other centers that CompSustNet would complement with a sustainability focus. For example, the Center for e-Design reveals no explicit concern with sustainable design, an area in which some CompSustNet members are deeply interested, so interactions across networks may increase the scope of each.

• Center for e-Design : “The coalition was established to create new design paradigms and electronic design tools that will assist in generating high quality products and systems at a reduced cost while also reducing the time associated with designing complex engineered products and systems.”

Finally, there are many centers  and networks that are funded by sources other than NSF, which CompSustNet will also undoubtedly connect with.

• Center for Water and the Environment :  “To foster the economic development of Minnesota’s Natural Resources in an environmentally sound manner to promote private sector employment.”

Enumerating the conceptual and social connections — existing and potential — between large centers could be a great benefit to NSF. It is probable that no such map exists in the corridors of NSF or elsewhere, primarily for reasons of NSF staff workload (e.g., as discussed under posts on NSF Program Director experience and  implementations of NSF broader impacts). The CompSustNet synthesis team will be working to produce an easily visualized map across centers and networks, as well as building on existing visualizations created for within-CompSustNet relationships.

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.

On June 1 two Vanderbilt University rising seniors in computer science, Zimei Bian and Selina Chen, started working with me on CompSustNet. They are supported for the summer by NSF award Collaborative Research: CompSustNet: Expanding the Horizons of Computational Sustainability.

I am so happy to have Zimei and Selina working with me, on behalf of CompSustNet. Some of this post is dedicated to Zimei’s and Selina’s activities, but their tasks can be adapted to any institution within ComSustNet. I conclude this post with a reminder that Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) awards can expand undergraduate participation in CompSustNet still further.

VU undergraduate assistants participate in each of three classes of activities, but students vary in the extent that they concentrate in each area, depending on their interests and strengths, and the needs of CompSustNet.

1. Each student assistant becomes conversant with the research being conducted in CompSustNet,  by reading articles and participating in CompSustNet conference calls and local meetings. Students with particular interests in communication of science and technology, to include students majoring in Communication of Science and Technology, an undergraduate major at Vanderbilt, dive deeper into selected areas of the network, blog about CompSustNet activities, and prepare overviews of CompSustNet research for publication or broad dissemination through other means (e.g., a YouTube video module).
2. Each student helps translate selected research problems and results of CompSustNet into educational exercises appropriate for courses across the computer science curriculum (e.g., for inclusion in CompSust wikibooks). Students particularly interested in CS education can concentrate in this area, with additional goals of preparing papers to CS-education focused conferences (e.g., SIGCSE) or broad dissemination through other suitable means (e.g., contributions to Nifty Assignments).
3. Each student participates in a CompSust research project with me and/or other faculty in CompSustNet or Vanderbilt, with expectations for research result dissemination (e.g., co-authorship on publications) to depend on project and mentor.

Look for blog posts by Zimei and Selina here, as well as references to their other work on CompSustNet. And if you are a CompSustNet participant, don’t be surprised if you receive a query from them, or introduce themselves at the CompSust-16 conference in July!

More generally, CompSustNet will employ systematic strategies to engage undergraduate assistants. We will do this, in part, through REU supplemental awards on selected NSF collaborative awards that directly support CompSustNet. These REU supplements could support undergraduate participation on research projects in CompSustNet, or with proper planning and justification, even suitable projects outside of CompSustNet as currently construed. The appropriate use of REU supplements can be a mechanism for both strengthening the bonds within the network, as well as for extending the network. It is also worth considering whether REU sites might be a distinct way of growing the computational sustainability community still further!

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.

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.

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