Cornell receives $10 million grant for computing research

ITHACA — The National Science Foundation (NSF) on Jan. 7 announced a new $10 million award to Cornell University Computer Science Professor Carla Gomes, director of Cornell’s Institute for Computational Sustainability.

Gomes leads one of three “Expeditions in Computing” projects, each of which was awarded $10 million over five years by NSF, according to a Cornell Chronicle news release. The grants fund interdisciplinary, multi-investigator research teams working on transformative computing and technology. 

Gomes’ project will develop a large national and international research network called CompSustNet that will explore new research directions in computational sustainability, according to the release. With Cornell as the lead organization, CompSustNet will partner with 11 U.S. colleges and universities as well as with key organizations in the areas of conservation, poverty mitigation, and renewable energy. 

Other Cornell faculty leads on the project include Bart Selman and John Hopcroft, Department of Computer Science; David Shmoys, School of Operations Research and Information Engineering; and Jon Conrad, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. The CompSustNet team includes many other Cornell researchers as well as international computational sustainability scholars, the release said.

“We will launch CompSustNet, 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,” said Gomes, who also has appointments in the Department of Information Science and the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. ”Research will focus on cross-cutting computational topics such as optimization, dynamical models, big data, machine learning, and citizen science, applied to sustainability challenges.

“Advances in computational sustainability will lead, for example, to novel strategies for helping herders and farmers in Africa improve their way of life, saving endangered species, and scaling renewables up to meet 21st-century energy demand.”

Gomes also led a team that received one of the first Expeditions in Computing awards in 2008. Initial funding from NSF has led to more than $80 million in support from other agencies and organizations and helped stimulate a new field.

Universities in CompSustNet include: Bowdoin College, California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, Oregon State University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Southern California, and Vanderbilt University, the release noted. 

CompSustNet seeks to be a virtual research lab, including educational, community building, and outreach activities to ensure computational sustainability becomes a self-sustaining discipline, according to Cornell.