Speaker: Carla Gomes
Abstract
Computational sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field with the overall goal of developing computational models, methods and tools to help manage the balance between environmental, economic and societal needs for a sustainable future. In this talk I will provide an overview of computational sustainability, with examples ranging from wildlife conservation and biodiversity, to poverty mitigation, to large-scale deployment and management of renewable energy sources. I will highlight overarching computational challenges at the intersection of constraint reasoning, optimization, machine learning and dynamical systems. Finally, I will discuss the need for a new approach that views computational sustainability problems as “natural” phenomena, amenable to a scientific methodology, in which principled experimentation, to explore problem parameter spaces and hidden problem structure, plays as prominent a role as formal analysis.