available in executable form only. In both cases, a valuable service would be provided to
the scientific community to make these live models available and a significant increase
in the complexity of the research would be expected to follow. With that would come new
problems, new challenges and presumably new discoveries.
- Challenges
The importance of engaging a wider community to work on sustainability
challenges, including the ones highlighted in the examples above, can hardly be
overstated. To this end, we suggest the creation of specific Challenges to the
community of mathematical scientists. We define a Challenge to be one of two types: a
Competitive Challenge and a Grand Challenge. In short, both encompass a set of
problems intended to stimulate research and attract the attention of mathematical
scientists in different fields to work on these important questions.
5.1. Competitive challenges
By “Competitive Challenges” we mean contests open to anyone, and often with
some prize to the winners, to solve a well-defined mathematical problem. One example
is the Netflix challenge to predict individuals’ movie preferences; this competition
generated significant attention and culminated in a million-dollar prize three years after
its inception. Other successful examples of competitive challenges include the ACM
KDD Cup which sponsors competitions each year (including an early version of the
Netflix contest) and more recently the IEEE ICDM contest, both of which challenge
scientists to solve prediction-type problems from domains as diverse as protein structure
to urban traffic congestion. In the operations research community, the French OR
society ROADEF sponsors the ROADEF/EURO Challenge each year, in which a
problem defined in conjunction with an industrial partner is posed to the research
community, roughly a year is given to any individual or team to solve the problem, and
finally, prizes provided by the sponsor to the winning team. Another example is the
engineering competitions such as the steel bridge building competition sponsored each
year for undergraduate and graduate students and their professors by the American
Society of Civil Engineers and the SAE Formula student design competition and its
recent cousin the Formula Hybrid competition for designing next-generation race cars
and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Developing a Competitive Challenge for the general mathematical sciences is in
itself a challenge but the attention that it would generate for the discipline would be
significant. Competitive challenge problems related to sustainability can come from
those discussed in the Examples section of this document or others. The primary steps
needed in developing a Competitive Challenge for problems related to sustainability are
the identification of a sponsor organization and, where possible, an organization to
provide data and potentially prize money. The identification of the sponsoring
organization helps to drive in many cases the definition of the competition problem to be
solved.
- Mathematical Recommendations
- Develop optimization techniques that can address the kinds of management
problems arising in studies of sustainability in the face of uncertainty, including
stochastic optimization and other approaches.