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Artificial intelligence (AI) drives innovation across society, economies and science. We argue for the importance of building AI technology according to open-source principles to foster accessibility, collaboration, responsibility and interoperability.
Dr Barbara Liskov — a mostly retired Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a pioneer in object-oriented programming and distributed systems and the winner of the 2008 ACM A. M. Turing Award, which is the highest distinction in computer science — talks to Nature Computational Science about her work on data abstractions, her career trajectory and recognizing the contributions of women in computer science.
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in STEM careers, but also raises awareness of the challenges that women have faced in science, as well as the importance of female role models in STEM.
Dr Angela K. Wilson, director of the Michigan State University Center for Quantum Computing, Science and Engineering and John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, talks to Nature Computational Science about protein-based carbon-capture, the use of machine learning in computational chemistry, and making the research field more equitable for female researchers.
Dr Diyi Yang, Assistant Professor of computer science at Stanford University, talks to Nature Computational Science about understanding human communication in a social context, building natural language processing systems that are human-centered, and the challenges that female researchers face in the field.
As we approach the half-way point in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, we discuss how computational science could help in reaching some of these goals by 2030.
Dr Perrine Hamel — Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University’s Asian School of the Environment and Principal Investigator at the Earth Observatory of Singapore — talks to Nature Computational Science about making cities more sustainable and resilient by incorporating green infrastructure into urban environments, as well as about our current progress with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to sustainable cities and climate action.
Dr Cristina Villalobos — Myles and Sylvia Aaronson endowed professor in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), Director of the Center of Excellence in STEM Education, and Fellow of the American Mathematical Society — talks to Nature Computational Science about her work on empowering underrepresented groups in STEM education and gives her insights into the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) related to equitable education and gender equality.
Progress towards universal access to safe drinking water and nutritious food has been moving forward at a slower than desired rate. Computational tools can help accelerate progress towards these goals, but solutions need to be open source, and designed, developed and implemented in a participatory manner.
Rapid urban expansion presents a major challenge to delivering the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Urban populations are forecast to increase by 2.2 billion by 2050, and business as usual will condemn many of these new citizens to lives dominated by disaster risk. This need not be the case. Computational science can help urban planners and decision-makers to turn this threat into a time-limited opportunity to reduce disaster risk for hundreds of millions of people.
