Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing (DESC) Program Webinar

The purpose of Design for Environmental Sustainability in Computing (DESC) (NSF 23-532) is to encourage the submission of novel and high-impact proposals that advance sustainability in all aspects of computing broadly. DESC seeks proposals that look well beyond power/energy efficiency of computing, with design for sustainable-computing approaches with carbon and other sustainability metrics as first-order optimization criteria being a particular goal of the program.  For example, DESC encourages a full lifecycle-analysis approach that considers computing across its lifecycle, including embodied impacts from manufacturing, impacts from supply chains, reuse, recycling, and disposal. DESC is open to diverse notions of environmental sustainability, presuming they can be quantified and will provide impact. Sustainability solely for economic and/or societal impacts is out of scope for DESC; moreover, DESC is not soliciting proposals that seek solely to advance energy efficiency, performance, or other traditional computing metrics or to develop computing to support sustainability in other domains. Rather, DESC is focused specifically on design for environmentally sustainable computing.

This 60-minute information webinar will provide an overview of the DESC program, including context for the topic, the topic areas of interest, and those excluded, as well as a question-and-answer session with NSF Program Directors responsible for this solicitation.