Collaborative Research: Conference: NSF Workshop Sustainable Computing for Sustainability

The motivations behind this project are two-fold. It is driven by the growing role of computing as an essential tool in devising solutions to the many major societal problems created by climate change. At the same time, it is an acknowledgment of the fact that, in spite of its positive role, computing is itself facing sustainability challenges as well as contributing to some of the factors behind climate change. Fostering the development of new initiatives addressing those problems and challenges is the main goal of this project. The project’s novelties lie in jointly addressing the dual role of computing as an enabler of solutions to climate change as well as a contributor to climate change itself, and in exploring the challenges faced by the interdisciplinary teams needed to develop effective approaches. The project’s impacts are similarly two-fold: It will help prioritize new research directions where computing can have a transformative role in developing solutions to climate change challenges and it will increase awareness of the need for computing to account for sustainability in its own development. Towards realizing the project’s goals, the investigators rely on a two-prong approach. The project’s first phase consists of an open information gathering effort conducted virtually (online) towards identifying critical, yet poorly explored sustainability problems that computing can help address. The second phase seeks to develop a concrete agenda for not only addressing those challenges, but equally importantly help build and sustain the interdisciplinary scientific community that successfully tackling them requires. This second phase is in the form of a workshop bringing together not only researchers across the required disciplines, but also researchers with expertise in building interdisciplinary teams and team science towards informing the creation and sustainability of successful teams involving participants across multiple disciplines. 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.