The Computing Community Consortium just held a two-part workshop, “Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations”. The workshops were sponsored by the National Science Foundation’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnership (TIP). TIP has a major initiative “Convergence Accelerator” that funds programs seeking to solve societal challenges through convergence research and innovation. The goal is to encourage interdisciplinary work, “merging ideas, approaches and technologies from a wide and diverse range of sectors and expertise.” The first workshop in the series was held in-person in Denver, Colorado on October 27-28th, 2022. The goal was to frame the research focus for impact areas (application domains), computing research building […]

Climate change is a hot topic that has ongoing conversations in every field imaginable, computer science being no exception. Researchers and scientists are increasingly concerned about the negative impacts computing has on the environment. While car exhaust, carbon footprints from factories and other obvious forms of pollution take the forefront in people’s minds – everyday actions done on the computer such as downloading a movie, flipping through TikTok or streaming YouTube videos uses a considerable amount of energy. In addition, technology such as laptops and phones contain a lot of toxic chemicals and heavy metals that infiltrate the environments upon disposal. Computer scientists are starting to rethink the way we […]

The following is joint Dear Colleague Letter from Assistant Directors at the National Science Foundation about innovative solutions to climate change. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released a whitepaper in August 2021 on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), and Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder and a CCAI Advisor), to highlight the role of computing research in addressing climate change-induced challenges. See the full whitepaper here.  Dear Colleagues: This Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) encourages the science and engineering communities to develop forward-thinking research that will demonstrably aid in the Nation’s goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions […]

The Climate Change AI (CCAI) organization, which is composed of volunteers from academia and industry who believe that tackling climate change requires concerted societal action in machine learning, has announced a new Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help support climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as climate science, across many different areas, for example energy, agriculture, forestry, climate modeling, and disaster response (for a broader overview of the space, please refer to Climate Change AI’s interactive topic summaries and materials from previous events). However, impactful research and deployment have often been held back by a lack of data […]

Earlier this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change, released their Climate Change 2021- The Physical Science Basis Report. The report is sobering. We know that human activity is changing the climate in unprecedented and sometimes irreversible ways, but this recent report warns of increasingly extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, and a key temperature limit being broken in just over a decade. It shows how catastrophic the outlook will be if we don’t act now.  The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a new whitepaper on Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, coauthored by Nadya […]

The following post is from Khari Douglas, who is currently at the 2019 Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg Germany.  Every year at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) a hot topic, or theme, related to mathematics and computer science is chosen to be addressed by a panel of experts. At this year’s HLF the hot topic sessions, which took place on Tuesday, September 24th, focused on climate change and what we can do to tackle the problem. The sessions addressed questions like: “How can we predict the next century’s climate if we can hardly predict this weekend’s weather? Is the latest flooding or heat wave due to climate change, or not? Why […]