Role of Information Sciences and Engineering in Sustainability (RISES) Workshop, was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Computing Community Consortium. It was held at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill on February 3 and 4, 2011.

Goals of the workshop:

• Explore and define fundamental research challenges and applications of the information sciences and engineering in sustainability, including energy and transportation;
• Provide opportunities for relevant academic and industrial researchers (e.g., computer and information scientists, systems engineers, social and behavioral scientists), practitioners (e.g., power systems engineers, electricity suppliers), and government officials to identify mutual interests, as they relate to both near- and long- term challenges and solutions; and
• Identify a range of approaches for driving fundamental research, accelerating the translation of research outcomes into products and services affecting the “smart grid” and the broader sustainability enterprise, and incentives for widespread adoption/use of these products/services.

It is important to note that this workshop did not focus on:

• Technologies where current research and/or development are well under way, e.g., power management in data centers.
• Routine applications of IT to further sustainability.
• Extensions of current IT practice that are broadly applicable, e.g., improving simulation techniques used in computer-aided design or machine learning to detect trends in economics or behavior.
• Routine support for eScience (but scientific studies of sustainability may present some uniqueproblems of interest).

In summary, the aim of the workshop was to identify new research opportunities in the information sciences and engineering that address sustainability objectives. Many of these are interdisciplinary, requiring collaboration with researchers in the many areas of science and technology that contribute to a sustainable world.