University of Washington
Computing for the Environment
About Us
Computing for the Environment (CS4Env) at the University of Washington supports novel collaborations across the broad fields of environmental sciences and computer science & engineering. We seek to catalyze new efforts, create a community of cross-disciplinary researchers, and position teams to be competitive for additional funding opportunities. The initiative engages environmental scientists and engineers, computer scientists and engineers, and data scientists in using advanced technologies, methodologies and computing resources to accelerate research that addresses pressing societal challenges related to climate change, pollution, biodiversity and more.
Upcoming Events
- October 28, 2025
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CS4Env Biweekly Lunch
October 28, 2025 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location: eScience Institute on the 6th floor of the Physics-Astronomy building
Details: Asta: Building and Evaluating Scientific AI Assistants
Abstract: AI has tremendous potential for accelerating science---helping researchers access the literature, analyze data, execute experiments, and more. Asta, a project at the Allen Institute for AI, aims to deliver comprehensive scientific assistants that support all aspects of a scientific workflow. Rigorously evaluating such systems is a fundamental challenge, which led us to develop AstaBench, a holistic benchmark suite and leaderboard spanning the scientific discovery process. The work includes evaluations for scientific “deep research” systems, introducing methods for measuring coverage and precision of both answers and their attributions. Fully realizing AI's potential for scientists will require breakthroughs in scalable supervision, robust evaluation, and personalized and proactive assistance. To facilitate progress toward these goals, the Asta project provides open-source corpora, tools, and APIs.Doug Downey is Sr. Director of Semantic Scholar Research at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University. His research focuses on Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on AI systems that support scientific discovery. At Ai2, he helps lead the Asta project, and his publications have received paper awards at ACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, and AKBC.
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- November 18, 2025
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CS4Env Biweekly Lunch
November 18, 2025 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location: eScience Institute on the 6th floor of the Physics-Astronomy building
Details: Morgan Sanger (UW CEE)- AI & Geotech
Zoom link
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The Computing for the Environment initiative is supported in part by the Allen School, the College of the Environment, the College of Engineering, the eScience Institute, the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering Endowed Fund for Excellence, and a gift from Google.
