AI Lunch and Seminar

Carla P. Gomes - Challenges for AI in Computational Sustainability

Computational sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field with the overarching goal of developing computational models, methods, and tools to help manage the balance between environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. I will provide examples of computational sustainability problems, ranging from wildlife conservation and biodiversity, to poverty mitigation, to materials discovery for renewable energy materials. I will also highlight cross-cutting computational themes and challenges for AI at the intersection of constraint reasoning, optimization, machine learning, citizen science and crowd sourcing.

Speaker bio

Carla Gomes is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, with joint appointments in the Dept. of Computer Science, Dept. of Information Science, and the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. Gomes obtained a Ph.D. in computer science in the area of artificial intelligence and operations research from the University of Edinburgh. Gomes’s central research themes are the integration of concepts from constraint and logical reasoning, mathematical programming, and machine learning, for large scale combinatorial problems; the study of the impact of structure on problem hardness; and the use of randomization techniques to improve the performance of search methods. More recently, Gomes has become deeply immersed in research in the new field of Computational Sustainability. From 2007-2013 Gomes led an NSF Expeditions-in-Computing in Computational Sustainability. Gomes and collaborators have successfully pioneered and nucleated the new field of Computational Sustainability. Gomes is currently the lead PI of a new NSF Expeditions-in-Computing that established CompSustNet, a large-scale national and international research network, to further expand the field and Computational Sustainability. Gomes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science.