Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209
Dr. Carla Gomes
Computational Sustainability is a new emerging 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 examples of problems in Computational
Sustainability, ranging from wildlife preservation and biodiversity,
to balancing socio-economic needs and the environment, to large-scale
deployment and management of renewable energy sources, highlighting
overarching computational themes in constraint reasoning and
optimization and interactions with machine learning, and dynamical
systems. I will also discuss the need for a new approach to study such
challenging problems in which computational problems are viewed 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.
Bio:
Carla P. Gomes is an associate professor of computer science at
Cornell University, with joint appointments in Computer Science,
Information Science, and Applied Economics and Management. Her
research has covered several areas in artificial intelligence and
computer science, including planning and scheduling, integration of
constraint reasoning and operation research techniques for solving
combinatorial optimization problems, and randomized algorithms. Gomes
is currently pursuing the new research area of Computational
Sustainability. Gomes is the the Lead PI of an NSF Expeditions in
Computing award on Computational Sustainability and the director of
newly established Institute for Computational Sustainability at
Cornell University. Gomes is a Fellow of the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Refreshments will be provided at 10:45