IACS Research Themes
Research at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science is organized around four main themes. IACS faculty have identified these four initial research themes in order to:
- focus our attention and resources on current and high-impact multidisciplinary research topics that represent opportunities for leadership and growth;
- create new collaborations within and beyond IACS/SBU; and
- develop name recognition for IACS by helping answer questions such as what does IACS do, what are our research products, and what is our impact
While much of our research will be represented in these themes, their existence in no way minimizes the value of research beyond the themes. Similarly, IACS does many things other than research (e.g., training, research computing services, etc.) that are not explicitly identified as theme activities but nevertheless are instrumental to our success. Click on the left side bar to view the various media through which IACS faculty and staff communicate their research.
IACS Research Theme: HUMAN-CENTERED COMPUTING
is concerned with studying and enhancing human behavior using computational tools. Here, we take “human behavior" in the broad sense: it covers everyday human behavior in small groups (linguistics, psychology); human behavior and agency in society and its institutions, and across societies and time (sociology, economics, political science, history); and human creativity and the study of human creativity (rhetoric, literature studies, and the arts). Social scientists have long studied the interactions and communications that inform decisions and structure communities. However, as social networks have grown larger and more complex, and have increasingly moved ‘online,’ studying these dynamics requires doing so at scales heretofore inaccessible for researchers, demanding new skills and opening opportunities for new trans-disciplinary collaborations.
Contact: Owen Rambow
IACS Research Theme: CLIMATE & COMMUNITIES
addresses urgent, intertwined environmental and social challenges, from species extinction to environmental justice to climate change. An explosion of interest in computational and data-driven approaches to these problems has created opportunities and unique challenges, particularly the need to work with complex, spatio-temporal datasets that require tailored data management and analysis approaches. Lots of career opportunities for graduating science students with skills in data science, software engineering, and ML come from new funding from industry, tech-focused foundations, and long-established organizations such as NOAA and Conservation International. Our efforts will grow research at Stony Brook and support the development of an integrative and collaborative research community for the new New York Climate Exchange.
Contact: Heather Lynch
IACS Research Theme: DISCOVERY OF MOLECULES AND MATERIALS
addresses the urgent need for new materials to navigate the climate crisis and compete in the technology-driven world economy. New computational methods are driving transformative advances in sustainable energy conversion and storage (e.g., photovoltaics, batteries, and capacitors), carbon-neutral and energy-efficient manufacturing processes (e.g., photochemistry, catalysis, advanced manufacturing, and carbon dioxide capture), materials for advanced energy technologies (e.g., high-radiation environments, fusion reactors, and nanostructured materials), and drug discovery (e.g., protein structure and function and molecular docking). In all of these applications, advanced simulation methods provide detailed insights into the causal relationships between the atomic structure of molecules and materials and their macroscopic properties and function. In addition, design efforts can now be guided by large-scale, high-throughput material design processes, which fully integrate data from experiment and simulation using data-driven techniques enabled by advanced AI/ML. By providing interdisciplinary training in computational and disciplinary science, IACS is training the future leaders in such design efforts.
Contact: Ben Levine
IACS Research Theme: FRONTIERS IN COMPUTATION
seeks to advance scientific discovery by exploring future opportunities and challenges in how we compute and in the fields of research that can exploit advanced data and computation. Innovations in applied mathematics, computer science, algorithms, computer hardware, scientific software, and modern AI are all central to realizing this future. Supercomputers, having now reached the exascale (10E18 ops/sec), are now looking to the zettascale (10E21 ops/sec), anticipated in 2035-40. However, this 1000-fold increase in capability must come without significantly expanding the power requirements of current computers. Thus, zettascale computers will require completely new programming models, tools, and algorithms since, at that scale, the energy/power requirements of moving data will far exceed the cost of actual computation. Quantum computers and associated radically novel algorithms are poised to emerge as revolutionary tools in limited areas of science. Finally, in addition to AI transforming everything from software development to simulation to our interaction with human knowledge, computer technology is changing to meet the needs of AI and in turn opening new opportunities for science.
Contact: Robert Harrison
