Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations: A Convergence Accelerator Workshop

The Computing Community Consortium recently held a two-part workshop, “Building Resilience to Climate Driven Extreme Events with Computing Innovations”. The workshop series was 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 blocks that span the impact areas, research thrusts within impact areas, and cross-cutting principles. The impact areas, most stemming from a CCC white paper Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, were: Energy, Environmental Justice, Agriculture, Transportation, and Infrastructure. Six building blocks were identified in the workshop: Artificial Intelligence, Digital Twins, Cyberinfrastructure, Optimization/Planning, Visualization, and Data.

The second workshop in the series was a virtual webinar open to the public on November 10th, 2022. The goal of the second workshop was to brainstorm and build upon the framing set out in the “pre-workshop”. Workshop participants were split into break out groups by impact area to discuss findings and identify additional research thrusts, impact areas, and cross-cutting principles. Below are some of the whiteboards used to organize ideas that were generated during the workshop.

Be on the lookout for a report summarizing key findings and recommendations later this year.