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Conference | DOI: 10.1145/1562164.1562174
Karen A. Frenkel
computer Science meets
environmental Science
Scientists share knowledge and seek collaborators
at computational sustainability conference.
Two HUndrEd EnVironMEn- taL andcomputer scientists convened for four days in June for the First Interna- tional Conference on Computational Sustainability, held at Cornell University. The conference’s goal
was to establish and develop a research
community around the field of computational sustainability, which aims to
develop computational and mathematical models and methods for the management of resources needed to solve
the problems confronting sustainability
in today’s rapidly developing world.
PHo ToGRAPH By LInDsAy FRAnCE, CoRnELL UnIVERsI Ty PHo ToGRAPHy
As some conservationists and environmental scientists gave their presentations, however, it became apparent
that their knowledge of the computational techniques applicable to the
problems they want to solve lags behind
the state of the art in computer science.
Likewise, some computer scientists and
mathematicians are unaware that ecological problems often translate into
interesting decision optimization and
statistical learning problems involving combinatorial decisions, dynamic
modeling, and uncertainty, says Carla
Gomes, director of Cornell’s Institute
for Computational Sustainability. “We
must first find a common language,”
Gomes said. “This is new intellectual
territory with great potential, and with
unique societal benefits.”
Several computer scientists who
have created algorithms for environmental applications presented at the
conference. Carlos Guestrin, a professor of computer science at Carnegie
Mellon University and his former graduate student Andreas Krause (now an
assistant professor of computer science
at Caltech), for example, are optimizing
the placement of sensors to detect contamination in drinking water distribution systems. They have also developed
an algorithm that enables lake-trolling,
carla Gomes, director of cornell’s institute for computational Sustainability, with associate director David Shmoys.
sensor-equipped robots to detect algal
bloom and predict, even if no previous
data exists, where it will occur next.
Vipin Kumar, head of the computer
science and engineering department
at the University of Minnesota, spoke
about global scale patterns in biosphere processes and their impact on
the global carbon cycle. He and colleagues at NASA are investigating the
use of data mining algorithms to detect changes in the global land cover
using satellite data. Kumar’s team
developed a novel recursive merging
algorithm to identify changes in time
series data, which they applied to the
MODIS enhanced vegetation index for
California from 2001 to 2008 and produced detailed information on forest
fires, the conversion of farmland to
residential areas, and the conversion
of desert to farmland and other commercial uses.
Throughout the conference, environmental scientists encouraged computer
scientists to collaborate with them. Michael Runge, a research ecologist at the
U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wild-
life Research Center, said he and his colleagues had believed there were no solutions to many of the complex ways they
wanted to formulate ecological decision
problems. “I’ve realized that we were
over-constraining how we were thinking about problems,” he said. “I’ve had
my eyes opened to the number of tools
available from the mathematics and
computational side. The question is:
How do we connect these amazing tools
and the huge demand for their application to ecological problems?
“We need people to bridge communication between all these fields,
people who can see that a disease dynamics or water supply contamination
problem looks a lot like a telecommunications network problem,” says
Runge. “We also need people to do
the ‘plug and chug’ applied work that
is not necessarily novel from the academic standpoint, but critical from the
applied standpoint.”
Based in Manhattan, Karen A. Frenkel is a freelance
writer and editor specializing in science and technology.