Computing Research for Sustainability (2012) / Chapter Skim
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From page 1... ...
1 is a natural bridge between technical and social solutions because it can offer improved communication and transparency for fostering the necessary economic, political, and cultural adjustments. Moreover, IT is at the heart of nearly every large-scale socioeconomic system -- including systems for finance, manufacturing, and the generation and distribution of energy -- and so sustainability-focused changes in those sysems are inextricably t linked with advances in IT.
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Although much of the focus in sustainability has been on mitigating climate change, with efforts aimed at managing the carbon dioxide cycle and increasing sustainable energy sources, there are other important sustainability challenges (such as water management, improved urban planning, supporting biodiversity, and food production) that can also be transformed by advances in computing research and are thus considered in this report.
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and improved system models, to improved control and optimization (e.g., of logistics and smart electric grids) , to improved communications and human-computer interfaces (enabling people to make more effective decisions)
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Approaches to a sustainable food system include taking a systems view of the challenge; developing methods for measuring the costs, benefits, and impacts of different agricultural systems; assisting in the use of precision agriculture to minimize needed inputs; making information accessible for informed consumption; and developing social networks for local food sourcing. As with the smart electric grid, information and data management are essential to making progress toward a smarter, more sustainable, global food system.
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Sustainability, of course, encompasses much more than the areas and examples outlined above, which are used here to illustrate the breadth of the challenges that need to be faced and the role that computer science and information technology can play. THE VALUE OF THE COMPUTER SCIENCE APPROACH TO PROBLEM SOLVING As the sections below discuss, several key underlying philosophical and methodological approaches of computer science are well matched to key characteristics of sustainability problems.
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Moreover, the urgency of acting in the face of threats to biodiversity and consequences of global climate change means that the best-known options need to be deployed quickly 6Of course, many other scientific disciplines offer useful methodological approaches to sustainability, some of which overlap with what computer science offers. This report focuses on computer science, as directed in the study committee's statement of task (see the Preface)
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COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH AREAS Despite numerous opportunities to apply well-understood technologies and techniques to sustainability, there are also hard problems -- for example, the mitigation of climate change -- for which current methods offer at best partial solutions and the pressing nature of the challenges motivates rapid innovation. This section describes some salient technical research areas and outlines a broad research agenda for CS and sustainability.
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From page 8... ...
The areas correspond well to measurement, data mining, modeling, control, and human-computer interaction, which are well-established research areas in computer science. This overlap of selected research areas with established research areas has positive implications: research communities are already established, and it will not be necessary to develop entirely new areas of investigation in order to effectively address global sustainability challenges.
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However, to be considered successful, CS research on sustainability must ultimately contribute to generalizable knowledge about sustainability, and the contribution or proposed solution should, at the same time, require new computational techniques or thinking beyond the current state of the art in computing. Establishing metrics for multidisciplinary work that are both actionable and meaning
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Just as specific proposed solutions will need to be assessed in an iterative fashion, so too the research enterprise will need to have informed checkpoints and evaluative criteria in order to ensure that the goal of having a real impact is being met. Thus the committee urges an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, iteration, and high-level information sharing to assess progress. Foster Sustainability Research Through Funding Initiatives Programmatically, traditional computer science research funding approaches are unlikely to be adequate to address the need discussed here.
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Foster Needed Multidisciplinary Approaches The type of work described above will have to be done across disciplinary boundaries and to involve experts from many disciplines, as well as individuals who themselves have deep expertise in more than one discipline. Among the several opportunities for enhancing multidisciplinary approaches are scholarships that emphasize the development of expertise in complementary disciplines, and regular, high-level summits involving CS and sustainability experts -- practitioners and researchers -- to inform shared research design, assess progress, and identify gaps and opportunities.
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From page 12... ...
Blend Sustainability and Education A shifting of the culture of CS to embrace sustainability more fully as an important and fruitful application area for research needs to include educating CS students about ways to have an impact with computing, computation, and systems approaches in important areas. Such a shift in culture would encourage students to develop domain expertise and to collaborate directly with domain experts while in graduate school or in preparing for graduate work.
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