STEM Grants
18 Projects Aim To Advance Sustainability Through Technology
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has
granted Cyber-Innovation for Sustainability Science and Engineering (CyberSEES)
awards totalling $12.5 million to 18 university research projects that seek to
advance the science of environmental sustainability while also advancing
computing and communication technologies.
The two- to four-year grants range from $100,000 to $1.2 million each and
"bring together teams of researchers from computer science and other disciplines
to develop new tools, technologies and models that advance sustainability
science," according to the NSF.
"Computing plays a central role in understanding and promoting sustainability
science in a range of areas from climate models to managing watersheds," said
Suzi Iacono, acting assistant director for Computer & Information Science &
Engineering at NSF, in a prepared statement. "At the same time, work on these
problems can fuel advances in computing, for example, in optimization, modeling,
simulation, prediction, decision-making and inference."
The CyberSEES awards will fund research into harvesting energy from ocean
waves; using math and computer science methods to understand how near-shore
marine organisms may cope under extreme temperature stress; developing advanced
cryptography to support the sharing of product life-cycle information by
corporations; exploring the relationship between climate change and extreme
weather events; and numerous other projects.
Research projects receiving 2014 NSF CyberSEES awards include:
- "Ocean Wave Energy and the Power Grid: Optimization and Integration" at
Lehigh University;
- "Data-driven approaches to managing uncertain load control in
sustainable power systems" at University of Michigan Ann Arbor;
- "Sustainably Unlocking Energy from Municipal Solid Waste Using a
Sensor-Driven Cyber-Infrastructure Framework" at University of Michigan Ann
Arbor;
- "Connecting Next-generation Air Pollution Exposure Measurements to
Environmentally Sustainable Communities" at University of Michigan Ann Arbor
and University of Colorado at Boulder;
- "Integrative Sensing and Prediction of Urban Water for Sustainable
Cities" at University of Texas at Arlington;
- "Building Informatics: Utilizing Data-Driven Methodologies to Enable
Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Planning of Urban Building Systems" at
Stanford University and New York University
- "Learning Relations between Extreme Weather Events and Planet-Wide
Environmental Trends" at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, George
Washington University and George Mason University;
- "SEA-MASCOT: Spatio-temporal Extremes and Associations: Marine
Adaptation and Survivorship under Changes in extreme Ocean Temperatures" at
Northeastern University;
- "Infrastructure and Technology Supporting Citizen Science Data Usage and
Distribution for Education and Sustainability" at Smithsonian Institution
and University of Maryland College Park;
- "Cyber-Enabled Water and Energy Systems Sustainability Utilizing Climate
Information" at North Carolina State University;
- "Real-time Ambient Noise Seismic Imaging for Subsurface Sustainability"
at Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Georgia State University Research
Foundation and University of Utah;
- "Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through
Crowdsourced Data Synthesis" at University of California, Irvine;
- "Combining Experts and Crowds to Address Challenging Societal Problems"
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stevens Institute of
Technology;
- "Tenable Power Distribution Networks" at University of Michigan Ann
Arbor, George Washington University and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities;
- "Meghdoot: A Multi-Cloud Infrastructure for Enhancing Sustainability via
Effective Monitoring of Inland Waters and Coastal Wetlands" at University of
Georgia Research Foundation;
- "A New Reliability-Assuring Computational Framework for Grid Operations
under High Renewable Penetration" at Purdue University;
- "Preserving the Privacy of Life Cycle Inventory Data in Distributed
Provenance Networks" at University of California, Santa Barbara; and
- "Interdisciplinary Research on Introducing Heat-Tolerant Wheat to
Bolster Food Security" at Stanford University.
The CyberSEES program is part of the NSF's Science, Engineering and Education
for Sustainability (SEES) effort to support sustainability-related
interdisciplinary research and education.
Further information about the CyberSEES program and award recipients can be
found on the
National Science Foundation's site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].