REU Site: Computing for an Equitable Energy Transition

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This project establishes a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Climate change is a significant threat to humanity and the natural world. The objective for the Computing for an Equitable Energy Transition (CEET) REU site is to expose undergraduate students to the important and significant role that computing will play in the transition to sustainable energy, both as an increasingly significant energy consumer and in optimizing society’s energy- and carbon-efficiency. The project will emphasize the importance of ensuring an equitable energy transition that does not unfairly impact marginalized groups. CEET's activities will focus on three distinct computing sub-disciplines that are important for enabling an equitable energy transition, including i) designing energy-efficient, reliable, and low-cost sensors, i.e., sensing, ii) designing energy- and carbon-efficient cloud platforms and applications, i.e., computing, and iii) analyzing collected data to identify and exploit opportunities for improving society’s sustainability that are equitable, i.e., analysis. CEET will emphasize the recruitment of groups traditionally under-represented in computing. The intended impact is to train students to work at the intersection of computing, sustainability, and equity.CEET's scope is broad, as its methods and approaches draw from multiple inter-related sub-disciplines of computing that are critical to achieving an equitable energy transition. Sensing-centric projects will focus on inferring useful information from coarse, indirect, and unreliable sensors that enable environmental monitoring without expensive large-scale sensor deployments. Computing-centric projects will focus on optimizing energy- and carbon-efficiency to reduce the environmental impact of large-scale cloud platforms and applications. Data-centric projects will develop methods for analyzing collected sensor data to automatically identify and exploit real-world opportunities for energy and carbon savings. In each case, projects will consider problems through an equity lens to better understand the reasons and consequences of inefficiency. Ultimately, CEET's goal is to provide students a broad background in the many areas of computing research that intersect the energy transition.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.