NSF announces Expeditions in Computing Awards

New initiative provides substantial funding to pursue ambitious, fundamental research to define future of computing and information

The Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has established four new Expeditions in Computing. Each of these $10 million grants will allow teams of researchers and educators to pursue far-reaching research agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society.

"We created the Expeditions program to encourage the research community to send us their brightest and boldest ideas," said Jeannette Wing, NSF's assistant director for CISE. "We received an overwhelming response, and I'm delighted with the results of our first annual competition. The four Expeditions together push both the depth and breadth of our field: pursuing longstanding scientific questions of computing, creating a new field of computational sustainability, experimenting with novel technologies for secure, ubiquitous computing and communications of the future, and exploring what we even think of as computing."

The projects are summarized below.

In their Expedition to Understand, Cope with, and Benefit From Intractability, Sanjeev Arora and his collaborators at Princeton University, Rutgers University, New York University and the Institute for Advanced Study will attack some of the deepest and hardest problems in computer science, striving to bridge fundamental gaps in our understanding about the power and limits of efficient algorithms. Computational intractability, a concept that permeates science, mathematics and engineering, limits our ability to understand nature or to design systems. The PIs hope to better understand the boundary between the tractable and the intractable. This has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of algorithmic processes in a host of disciplines and to cast new light on fields such as quantum computing, secure cryptography and pseudorandomness. The research team plans to draw on ideas from diverse fields including algorithms, complexity, cryptography, analysis, geometry, combinatorics and quantum mechanics.

In the Expedition Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society, Carla Gomes and her colleagues at Cornell University, Bowdoin College, the Conservation Fund, Howard University, Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory will explore the development and application of computational methods to enable a sustainable environment, economy and society. By tackling challenges that have not traditionally been addressed by computational approaches, Gomes and her team hope to create a new field of computational sustainability--much like computational biology has arisen in past decades--that will stimulate new research synergies across the areas of constraint optimization, dynamical systems, and machine learning. The research team is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together computer scientists, applied mathematicians, economists, biologists and environmental scientists.