Zili Yang’s monograph, titled “The Environment and Externality: Theory, Algorithms and Applications,” was published in December by Cambridge University Press.

“If we don’t cooperate, if each individual strives for their own interest, collectively we create an economy with uncontrolled pollution,” says Yang, a professor of economics who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2002. “If we cooperate, pollution can be controlled efficiently.”

Some ideas in the book are inspired by the RICE model (Regional Integrated Climate-Economy model) made famous by William Nordhaus. The 2018 Nobel laureate was Yang’s doctoral adviser at Yale University.

Think of the global economy as a cake to be shared among countries. It can be sliced in various ways. Right now, some slices are very large and others are quite thin. As economists think about ways to address climate change and reduce pollution, few if any countries are willing to go away from the table with a smaller piece of that cake.

Yang wants to find a way to divide the cake as fairly as possible. This cutting method is at the core of his work.

Yang begins the new book with a brief discussion of the concept of externality. When some people’s or countries’ welfares are affected by others’ activities without their explicit consent, then externality exists, he writes.

This is a core challenge of environmental economics. Why? Because all pollution hurts people. It may not harm you personally, but it’s hurting someone.

When people, countries or regions cooperate, they internalize this externality. The cake gets bigger, so to speak, but when it’s sliced some countries may still walk away with less than they had before.

“Most times it’s politically infeasible,” Yang says.

His goal? Come up with a cutting method where every country gets a larger slice of the new, larger cake.

The method many economists employ basically says we sum up all agents or countries to form a social welfare function (so 15 countries equals 15). Countries are treated as equals, whether they’re small or large and whether the climate impacts they face are significant or minimal.

“The ‘equal’ way is not fair,” Yang says.

Yang doesn’t think that Fiji and the United States should be weighted equally, for example. He would say 15 countries equals n; if you’re more significantly affected, you should be expected to do more to fix the problem. Likewise, if a country is responsible for more emissions, it should be responsible for more mitigation costs.

His method recognizes that countries have to see how their circumstances will be improved. “You can’t force people to collaborate if it makes them worse off than when they weren’t cooperating,” he says.

Yang is also the author of “Strategic Bargaining and Cooperation in Greenhouse Gas Mitigations,” published in 2008 by MIT Press.

In his earlier work, Yang worked with the RICE model to “cut the cake” fairly. What he came up with took months of trial and error.

In the new monograph, he outlines an algorithm that makes an accurate cut on the first attempt, no trial and error required. He says the outcome and its elegance surprised him.

“I apply the theory and try to tell non-economists about it so it can be useful in policy,” Yang says. “My conclusion is unique.”

Other methods rely on a second round of “cake cutting” to ensure greater fairness. Yang attempts to build in that fairness to start, then executes just one round of cutting. Most models accommodate three regions; his allows many more.

Some of Yang’s thinking is also based on understandings of bargaining that come from the work of Nobel laureate John Nash. In the early 1950s, Nash articulated the strategic interactions possible between two or more decision makers.

How do we make sure two people (or countries, or regions) want to cooperate? Yang says you have to ensure that both are better off if they work together than if they do not.

This is one reason that Yang is somewhat critical of the Paris climate accords; he thinks they don’t call for enough cooperation. The climate targets are too rigid, and countries’ actions are too independent, he says.

Yang hopes the ideas in his new book will be put to practical use. He provides all the algorithms so others can check his work, and the publisher will make a paperback copy available for sale, which may make it appealing as a textbook.

Jon M. Conrad, professor of resource economics at Cornell University, says the book will become an essential text for graduate-level courses in environmental economics. “Yang does a masterful job of determining the optimal level of externality in both static and dynamic models under cooperative, non-cooperative and coalitional solutions,” he wrote in a review of the book.

Yang sees himself as a scientist out to challenge established ways of thinking.

“You have to be skeptical,” he notes. “I don’t necessarily accept established results without questioning them. You want to find something other people haven’t noticed.”

Eleonora Recio, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in sustainability, focused on leachate runoff as part of the Summer Scholars and Artists program.

Leachate, water that has soaked through material and picked up particles in the process, is common in landfills. After it rains, water passes through garbage and absorbs chemicals, becoming toxic to the environment.

Recio tested the effects of different super-absorbent polymers on leachate. These everyday materials can absorb several times their own weight, and Recio saw an opportunity to combine her love for the environment and her passion for mechanical engineering.

Recio examined four different polymers to see how well they absorbed distilled water, tap water and leachate collected from the Broome County Landfill. A powder form of the polymer was mixed with the leachate and poured through a sieve, filtered through a vacuum, dipped in the leachate through a teabag or tested via the absorbency under load (AUL) method. The AUL method tested to see how much the polymer could absorb when under pressure.

After the tests, the samples were dried and weighed to measure how much leachate was absorbed. AUL provided the best results and most accurately mimicked the landfill environment.

“Science is a slow-moving process, but it has to be,” Recio says. “You really want to be as accurate as possible.”

Congrui Jin, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, advised Recio on the project. Recio originally approached her mentor when she was just a sophomore.

“It was the first time I’ve had a student who just finished [their] second year,” Jin says. “She was very reliable, and she scheduled her tasks so she could finish by the end [of the summer]. I think she’s very motivated, and we want to have younger students in our labs.”

Recio says applying to conduct research so early in her undergraduate career forced her to work better under pressure and taught her how to learn in a fast-paced environment.

Outside of the lab, the Long Island native is a member of Alpha Omega Epsilon, a social and professional sorority for women in engineering and the technical sciences. She also serves as secretary for the Society of Hispanic Technical Engineers and works at Information Technology Services on campus.

Recio said the sorority has been a crucial pillar of her support system. “It’s been a huge help to have so much female support around me at all times,” she says. “I go to my classes and it’s 85% guys so it’s really nice to see a familiar face.”

Through her older classmates, she saw a glimpse of what could be next in her academic career.

Recio said she also hopes further research can test biodegradable varieties of polymers to further promote sustainability, which has also become her minor. She plans to attend graduate school and continue doing research.

“Sustainability is very important,” she says. “You may not be in a science-related field, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it, whether it’s in your professional life … or using your voice if you’re in a position of power.”

Binghamton University now boasts a No. 1 ranking in sustainability research from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

The campus is part of a five-way tie with Florida State University; University of California, Irvine; UC Merced and UC San Diego, which each earned a score of more than 100 percent.

Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biology, says although she is not surprised Binghamton ranks at the top for sustainability research, she is glad her community is getting the recognition it deserves.

“I think we know that we have committed people here doing research on this topic that work so hard, so to get that recognition is fantastic,” Hua says. “It wasn’t on my radar, but in terms of the quality of research I am not surprised at all. My colleagues are incredible.”

AASHE ranks universities in 17 different subsets of sustainability based on self-reports. The research subset score is derived from the amount of research on sustainability, as counted by number of faculty and departments.

Binghamton’s report shows that of 601 faculty and staff who conduct research, 156 of them focus on sustainability. That 25.96 percent brought the campus well over the 15 percent needed for a perfect score.

The report also shows 42 departments have at least one faculty member who conducts research. Of the 42, 34 of them have at least one who conducts sustainability research. The 80.85 percent score also tops the “perfect” mark of 75 percent.

To put a spotlight on key subjects, the University created five Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence (TAEs) in 2013. One of the TAEs focuses on Sustainable Communities. Carl Lipo, director of environmental studies, and Robert Holahan, associate professor in environmental studies, co-chair the TAE and bring faculty together from several departments.

“The TAE’s goal has always been to bring people from across campus with a similar research interest together,” Holahan says. “There’s 10 of us from the TAE who got together and have been working on a series of papers on sustainable communities. Without having a centralized foci, a place to go once a week, how are you going to meet those people?”

In addition to sparking research collaborations, the TAE also awards seed grants to support research and hosts a sustainability lecture series. A dozen faculty and staff members make up the TAE’s steering committee; about 30 people receive the group’s newsletter.

Hua, who participates in the TAE, runs a research lab focused on wetlands ecology and conservation. Much of the lab’s research looks at artificial stressors on populations, such as the effect of road salt on amphibians.

Hua says conservation research findings need to be presented in a way that the general public can understand.

“I think how we link conservation and sustainability in our research is really through education,” she says. “What that means to me is to link art and science through art shows that tell the story of our publications, children’s books to get kids interested in ecology and parasite ecology, things like card games and lesson plans for K through 12 educators.”

Binghamton’s proposed Nuthatch Hollow Living Building is another signature effort in sustainability. Besides being a center for sustainability education, the University also aims for it to be one of the few in the world to meet the Living Building Challenge standards, which require buildings to produce more energy than they use.

Mark Poliks, chair of the Smart Energy TAE, says research and innovations in smart energy are building blocks to a sustainable future and projects like the living building.

“The Smart Energy TAE is really involved in the technology that could eventually go into a learning building, or go into a facility where energy is being managed, energy is being harvested or energy is being stored,” Poliks says.

Faculty members associated with the Smart Energy TAE fit into four broad areas: solar and thermoelectric energy harvesting, energy storage, energy efficiency in electronic systems and sensor development for energy resource management. Some researchers in this group are looking at battery efficiency and alternative energy harvesting, like solar cells, to provide a more sustainable future.

“More and more homes are having solar on it, and as the technology gets upgraded it will be both safe and affordable to have an appropriate battery pack in the house so that you can power the house in the evening and not have to rely on the grid,” Poliks says.

Lipo says Binghamton’s attention to sustainability helped him decide to come to work here four years ago. Now, he says, the AASHE ranking will promote the idea even more.

“We want our campus to be known for sustainability,” Lipo says. “This recognition will attract even more students and faculty who are passionate about sustainability and we will continue to grow in that regard.”

The fourth-annual Research Days will be held April 22-24, featuring a keynote speech, student poster sessions, laboratory visits for area students and more. This year’s theme is sustainability.

“This is a great opportunity to showcase the research that is being done at Binghamton University by faculty and students, and it also gives us a chance to focus on a topic that is very important to our campus and our community,” said Donald Loewen, vice provost for undergraduate education and chair of the committee that organizes Research Days.

Raj Patel, a food activist and author, will be this year’s keynote speaker. His talk, “Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” will begin at 7 p.m. April 22 in the UU-Mandela Room and will be followed by a book signing.

Patel, a research professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and a senior research associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University in South Africa, holds degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University. He has worked for the World Bank and World Trade Organization and is now a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

Today there are 1 billion people starving and 1.5 billion overweight. The U.S. is the most overweight country on Earth, and has 48 million people who are “food insecure.” In Patel’s lecture, he’ll address how this came about and what can be done to stop it.

Research Days poster presentations will take place at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Friday, April 24, also in the Mandela Room. The events are a chance for undergraduate and graduate students from all academic disciplines to showcase their research. More than 100 students plan to participate this year, up from around 80 in 2014.

In addition to these events, Binghamton faculty will again be invited to introduce students to their scholarly work during classes April 22-24. Several researchers will open their labs to area middle and high school students as well.

For more details about Research Days, visit: http://go.binghamton.edu/researchdays.

Peter L.K. Knuepfer, associate professor of geological sciences, serves as director of Binghamton University’s Environmental Studies Program. He answered Discover-e’s questions about sustainability in time for Earth Day.

Q: How do you define sustainability?

A: Can we maintain the kinds of things we like to do and allow for the next generation to do them as well? What we do now is not sustainable in energy, in agriculture, in a huge number of areas.

Q: What’s the biggest issue facing the “green” movement now?

A: The single largest issue that faces our global society in terms of sustainability is answering the question of how can we maintain, improve or reorganize our standard of living? How can we become a renewable society? That’s what sustainability is ultimately all about.

Q: What sorts of changes can people make that are both doable and meaningful?

A: We have to make some real sacrifices, but if everybody does a little thing, it starts becoming significant. Changing to compact fluorescent light bulbs and driving more fuel-efficient cars are examples of the little things that, added up, can make a big difference.

Q: What role can a research university play in this area?

A: Universities can lead by example. For instance, we could put more solar panels up, or develop green roofs. Showing that we can generate electricity with approaches that are sustainable in the long term is important. We also have roles as educators. We have to challenge students to understand the difference between being “green” and being truly sustainable.

Q: What does that mean for individuals?

A: We are going to run out of the resources we are using. We can either adjust and go about our lives totally differently or face the collapse of society. We’ll hit some point where what we do not only isn’t sustainable in the long term, it isn’t sustainable in the short term.

Q: How do you compare this “green” movement to others?

A: There’s a sea change in terms of how people are thinking. Is it enough? No. People are still buying SUVs, mining coal, looking at exploiting other fossil fuel sources. Those are not sustainable things. I think we are going to see a continued high level of interest, desire and demand in this area. It has been cyclic over 40 years, and I do expect we’ll see a peak and a trough. But I don’t expect the trough to be as deep as the last one was in terms of interest.

Q: What about student engagement in sustainability?

A: We’re seeing a big growth in student activism across the country. The students who are engaged in environmental issues are more engaged than any I’ve seen since the late 1970s. At Binghamton, we have more than doubled the number of environmental studies majors in two years. These students want to change the world. I am, at heart, an optimist. I see a change in the last five years or so among our students and in society as a whole. I really trust, hope and have faith that we will figure it out.

That’s the promise of research conducted by Binghamton colleagues Kanad Ghose, a professor of computer science, and Bahgat Sammakia, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the University’s New York State Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Packaging and Integration, or S3IP.

“The amount of energy we spend on running our data centers in the U.S. is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure,” Ghose said. “That doesn’t sound like a big number, but it’s enough to power a couple of good-sized cities for most of the year.”

The statistics are “sobering,” Ghose said. The number of data centers is growing rapidly because of increasing demand for online services for everything from medical records to shopping.

“The unfortunate fact is there’s a lot of waste in this,” Ghose said. “All data centers are ‘overprovisioned.’ They’re designed to handle the peak loads. And most of the time, they operate at 40 to 60 percent of that. When data centers run at a lower than peak load, the energy efficiency is very poor.”

There are also inherent inefficiencies, in part because most servers run on the Linux operating system, which doesn’t have good power management solutions for servers.

That’s just the bad news from the information technology side. Then there’s the cooling.

“The cooling solutions are also overprovisioned,” Ghose said. “Data centers run hot because a lot of machines are packed into a small space. The loads in a data center fluctuate, and you cannot track that changing load fast enough in a cooling system, so you end up playing it safe. There’s an enormous amount of waste.”

Most of the facilities use chilled water, and it takes some time to lower or raise the temperature of the water by 5 degrees. New York state alone spends close to $600 million on utility costs for running its data centers. Half goes to power the computers; the other half is spent on cooling. And utility costs continue to rise.

Most researchers focus on smart workload management when they talk about “green” data centers, but Ghose and Sammakia say that’s not enough. They’re looking for a comprehensive solution. That will mean finding a way to spread the workload across all the machines, planning in advance for the workload allocation and the cooling budget. Ultimately, it means exercising cooling activities and workload activities synergistically.

Just-in-time provisioning of IT resources and just-in-time cooling are the keys here, said Ghose, who expects to set up an experimental data center with Sammakia and other collaborators soon. Companies such as Emerson Network Power and IBM have already expressed interest in the project.

Sammakia, who’s also the University’s executive director of economic development, said the test facility will give a boost to companies in the region and beyond. “Over the next five years, this will help us create hundreds of local jobs and attract companies to the area,” he said. “It will allow New York state and national companies to showcase their energy-efficiency projects.

“It’s a test facility, but at the same time it’s a real, operational data center. Each company will come in with its latest and greatest equipment.”

Ghose said an innovation that results in an energy reduction of, say, 15 percent could make a big splash. He believes their solution could result in savings of more than 25 percent. And the lessons drawn from data centers could pay off for desktop computers as well.

“The writing’s on the wall,” Ghose said. “Unless we address this now, things will become worse. Most server vendors are trying to pack more into the same space and making the problem worse. What makes it worse is the amount of heat you produce in one cubic foot of space. That’s going up significantly because things are becoming smaller and faster. And of course there’s a carbon footprint, the more energy you spend.”

Step into Qinru Qiu’s lab at Binghamton University and you’ll see what appears to be a teenage boy’s fantasy: Rack after rack of sleek, black PlayStation 3 game systems.

And while she’s quick to explain that the PS3s are set up to emulate a multiprocessor, not for an epic showdown in Resident Evil, Qiu’s work may one day fuel new adolescent dreams. Her work on low-power computing could lead to smaller computers that function more efficiently and use less power.

The work holds such promise, in fact, that Qiu has received a grant from the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious program for young faculty. Her $409,000, five-year grant from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program will fund a project beginning in June. Less than a quarter of applicants received grants.

Qiu’s project focuses on reducing the power demands of multiprocessor system-on-chip designs, which are starting to become more popular. The PS3s, for instance, have one general purpose CPU and eight special synergistic processors.

A single processor can be very fast, but as its performance improves it requires more and more power. A multiprocessor, on the other hand, can deliver the same performance as numerous single processors at much lower power.

The benefits of cutting power demands include reduced energy consumption and lower manufacturing costs. Low-power designs can also improve reliability, since high power consumption increases the temperature of a chip, which harms its reliability.

Qiu, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said her goal is to cut back the power demands of microprocessors while maintaining performance. Microprocessors are designed to deliver peak performance, even though users don’t need peak performance all the time.

“The basic idea is to slow the microprocessor down or put it into low-power mode when we’re not using it,” said Qiu, who believes the work has applications for everyday desktop machines as well as systems with high-end chips.

She traces her interest in low-power computing and dynamic power management back to her graduate studies. “Before, people just tried to minimize the power consumption of a chip when they designed it,” Qiu said. “Nowadays, more and more devices have many power modes, like a hard disk has a sleep mode, so we can have more control.”

For example, the industry uses the idea of a “time out.” After a certain amount of time, the computer goes into this mode to save power.

“A simple way to improve the ‘time out’ is to dynamically adjust the time-out period,” Qiu said. “If we know that whenever the computer gets idle it will be idle for a long time, the time-out period will be short. But if we know the user’s working style is working after a half-second of rest, then we can set the time period to be longer, because we don’t want it to turn on and turn off very frequently.”

Qiu investigates formal methods based on machine intelligence that learn the system workload and user behavior dynamically to enable such adaptive control. In addition to the user’s working style, adaptive power management takes into consideration the hardware, the software and the environment in which a system operates.

“We need something to detect the workload, predict the workload and characterize the hardware,” Qiu explained.

As part of the NSF project, Qiu will develop a new course on power management for senior-level undergraduates as well as graduate students. She is also teaching a system-on-chip class that was co-developed with local IBM engineers.

Qiu’s project will be the first systematic research for modeling, optimizing and evaluating adaptive and distributed power management for a large-scale multiprocessor system-on-chip design. And it comes at an opportune time, she said: Power demands have risen exponentially in the last couple of decades.

“In the 1990s, we were at 10 watts or 20 watts,” she said. “Nowadays a microprocessor can easily go up to 100 watts. And power density rises even faster because the chip gets smaller. With its current growing speed, the power density of a chip will soon exceed that of a nuclear reactor because of its size and consumption.”

U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer and Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey said they believe CASP can help to address the national energy crisis as well as lead to the establishment of companies that will create more jobs in upstate New York.

“We are very grateful to Senator Schumer and Congressman Hinchey for their support in securing this funding and for their continuing support of the University,” Binghamton University President Lois B. DeFleur said. “This is an exciting investment in the University and yet another step in the advancement of the Center of Excellence and its research. It is vital that we look at long-term future energy generation from solar power, and Binghamton University is the right place to do just that.”

CASP will address the scientific challenges of reducing the cost of solar power and enhancing energy efficiency. The multidisciplinary center will draw expertise from engineering, computer science, chemistry and physics to focus on areas such as solar conversion efficiency, storage capabilities, solar module stability and power system cost reduction.

CASP will also work with industry to develop new technologies for defense, energy, aerospace, consumer and industrial markets by focusing on solar power sources integrated with new product designs. Potential applications include transportation communication systems, power generation for buildings and devices that will charge cell phone and laptops without the use of batteries.

“A place like this is the hope of the future of the Southern Tier and of America,” said Schumer, who added that he feels that we have a “moral imperative” to advance research on solar energy.Hinchey said he expects to seek additional federal funding for the center in the future. “We need – in the U.S. and frankly around the world – a new industrial revolution,” he said.

Building on the expertise of S3IP, which incorporates the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing and the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center, CASP will develop thin film solar modules. Mimicking nature’s own energy-conversion processes, these ultra thin technologies will allow for the design of layered devices that capture all frequencies of the solar spectrum.

Gerald Sonnenfeld, vice president for research, noted that CASP builds on the University’s and the region’s historic strengths. Binghamton, he said, has become a model in terms of building collaborations among government, industry and academia.

“We are committed to the development of unique projects that can improve people’s lives,” Sonnenfeld said.

Using a sustainable model that demands that the individual device will generate much more energy in one year than it takes to manufacture, CASP researchers will be able to develop new and cost-effective applications.

“We all feel the pinch of rising energy costs and, as a society, need to explore alternatives,” said Seshu Desu, dean of the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science and CASP director. “At the Watson School, our faculty and students are working on addressing the greatest challenges of our technology-intensive society and harnessing low-cost alternative energy sources is at the forefront of our priorities.”