Carla Gomes of  Cornell University has been named as the 2021 recipient of the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for her work in Computational Sustainability and for foundational contributions to Artificial Intelligence.

The ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award is one of the ACM's Technical Awards whose recipients are selected by their peers for making contributions of significant impact. It is named in honor of  Allen Newell one of the founding pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence and from 1979-80 the inaugural President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the former name of the AAAI. This award has been presented annually since 1994 to one or more individuals selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines and carries a $10,000 prize, co-funded by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

Carla Gomes is the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. Her research area is Artificial Intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning, optimization, and machine learning. 

According to the ACM:

Gomes has played a key role in advancing the integration of methods from AI and operations research. With collaborators, she pioneered randomized restarts and algorithm portfolios for combinatorial solvers. This work has had a tremendous practical impact on solvers for satisfiability (SAT), mixed integer programming (MIP), and satisfiability modulo theories (SMT).

Inspired by her early work on experiment design for nitrogen management and wildlife-corridor design, Gomes conceived an ambitious vision for computational sustainability: a highly interdisciplinary research area which incorporates computational thinking to solve critical sustainability challenges. As the lead principal investigator (PI) of two National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions Awards, Gomes has grown Computational Sustainability into a robust and vibrant subfield. She has shown that addressing challenges in sustainability often leads to transformative research in computer science, in addition to having a significant practical impact. Gomes and her collaborators developed a framework for computing the high-dimensional Pareto frontier of ecological and socio-economic tradeoffs of hydro dam expansion in the Amazon Rain Forest.

More Information

2021 ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award

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