Collaborative Research: Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society

平衡环境、经济和社会对可持续未来的需求包含了前所未有的规模和复杂性的问题。由于自然发生的环境、全球范围、动态和不确定行为、离散和连续效应的混合以及高度互动的组成部分，与维持地球资源相关的问题可以从计算方法和思维中受益匪浅。计算和信息科学在提高人类管理和分配自然资源的效率和效力方面发挥着关键作用。为了实现这一目标，此次考察旨在建立和培育一个新的研究领域--计算可持续发展--由可持续发展领域的一系列困难计算问题和关键挑战驱动。这项应用理论考察将在三个计算可持续性主题上进行跨学科研究：保护和生物多样性；平衡社会经济需求和环境；以及可再生能源。鉴于自然问题可能具有机器学习技术可以发现的特殊结构，使得它们即使是NP难的也可以被解决，本研究试图激发新的研究协同效应，跨越边界，融合组合优化、动力系统、机器学习和约束推理的思想。一个“计算可持续发展研究所”将设在康奈尔大学，作为可持续发展的基础科学进步和实际应用的纽带。其使命和外联的一部分是在计算可持续性领域建立一个充满活力和多样化的研究社区，通过暑期研究经验和其他此类积极主动的活动吸引来自各种背景的新学生进入该领域，包括来自代表性不足群体的学生。

Balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future encompasses problems of unprecedented size and complexity. With naturally occuring settings, global scale, dynamic and uncertain behavior, mixture of discrete and continuous effects, and highly interactive components, problems associated with sustaining the earth's resources can greatly benefit from computational methods and thinking. There is a key role to be played by computing and information sciences in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness in the way humanity manages and allocates natural resources. Toward that objective, this Expedition aims to establish and nurture a new field of study--Computational Sustainability--driven by a wide range of hard computational problems and critical challenges in the area of sustainability. This applied theoretical Expedition will pursue interdisciplinary research across three computational sustainability themes: conservation and biodiversity; balancing socio-economic demands and the environment; and renewable energy. With the view that natural problems may have a special structure discoverable by machine learning techniques that allows them to be solved even though they are NP-hard, this research attempts to stimulating new research synergies that cross boundaries and merge ideas from combinatorial optimization, dynamical systems, machine learning and constraint reasoning. An "Institute for Computational Sustainability" will be based at Cornell to serve as the nexus of foundational science advancements and practical applications in sustainability. Part of its mission and outreach is to establish a vibrant and diverse research community in the area of computational sustainability, drawing new students into the field from all backgrounds including students from underrepresented groups via summer research experiences and other such proactive activities.