Research Agenda

 Home    Bio     Research Agenda    Presentations    Papers    Demos & Open Source    Meetings

 ICS

 IISI

Brief Research Statement

My research area is Artificial Intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning and optimization. I exploit connections between different research areas --- in particular artificial intelligence, operations research, and the theory of algorithms. Central themes of my research are: (1) the synthesis of formal and experimental research for understanding and exploiting problem structure, (2) the integration of concepts from constraint reasoning and mathematical programming, and (3) the use of randomization techniques to scale up the performance of complete (exact) search methods . I combine formal analysis with the study of applications such as planning, scheduling, combinatorial design, and multi-agent systems. Recently, I have become deeply immersed in the establishment of new field of Computational Sustainability.

Computational Sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field, with the overarching goal of studying and providing solutions to computational problems for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. Such problems are unique in scale, impact, complexity, and richness, often involving combinatorial decisions, in highly dynamic and uncertain environments, offering challenges but also opportunities for the advancement of the state-of-the-art of computer and information science. Work in Computational Sustainability integrates in a unique way various areas within computer science and applied mathematics, such as constraint reasoning, optimization, learning, and dynamical systems. The research necessarily entails a cross-fertilization of approaches and ideas from several research communities, bringing together computer scientists, biologists and environmental scientists, biological and environmental engineers, sociologists, and economists. Concrete examples of computational sustainability challenges range from to planning and optimization for wildlife preservation and biodiversity conservation, to poverty mapping, to the design of intelligent or ”smart” control systems for energy-efficient buildings, to balancing portfolios of renewable energy sources.

In 2008, under the NSF Expeditions in Computing program, we created the Institute for Computational Sustainability (ICS) to forge a highly interdisciplinary effort to nurture the field of Computational Sustainability. Our vision is that computer science can --- and should --- play a key role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the way we manage and allocate our natural resources. The plethora of challenging computational research questions posed by sustainability problems, pushing the boundaries of current computational methods, also provides an exciting way to broaden and advance the state-of-the-art of computer science.

Cornell Graduate Research Field Memberships