Computing Research for Sustainability (2012) / Chapter Skim
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3 Programmatic and Institutional Opportunities to Enhance Computer Science Research for Sustainability
3 Programmatic and Institutional Opportunities to Enhance Computer Science Research for Sustainability
Pages 86-104
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From page 86... ...
-- which couples information and innovation -- is vital to sustainability. For computer science to play its part in meeting global sustainability challenges, priority should be given to research that addresses one or more important sustainability challenges (examples were described in Chapter 1)
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From page 87... ...
It then offers suggestions on how to structure research to promote meaningful impact on sustainability. Finally, the chapter identifies methodological opportunities for optimizing research outcomes and impacts.
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From page 88... ...
One cannot understand how technol ogy will affect sustainability without understanding what people will do with it. The emphasis in computer science on extensibility in system design takes into account the fact that technology as used matters, not just as designed. • Design thinking.
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From page 89... ...
Moreover, requirements inevitably change over time, necessitating flexible or evolvable designs. Because of this large effect of a system's architecture on almost all aspects of the system over its life cycle, the architecture of larger-scale systems of necessity merits significant attention and resources.
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From page 90... ...
In other equally consequential areas, however, broad applicability has only emerged years or even decades later, as researchers began with domain-specific problems and developed solutions and then later were able to generalize and understand deeper truths from this panoply of specific contributions. Examples of important contributions that began as highly specific projects include the World Wide Web (originally conceived as a means to share research papers and scientific information)
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From page 91... ...
That list includes time-sharing, client/server computing, entertainment, Internet, local area networks, workstations, graphical user inter faces, very-large-scale integration design, and reduced instruction set computing processors. A CSTB report published in 2004 articulated the essential character of computer science, and focused on seven key themes: computer science (1)
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From page 92... ...
For example, the hypothesized research on the smart grid takes an approach to the problem that is fundamentally a computer networks perspective (inspired by the success of the Internet) , but it is not initially intended to make universal contributions to the theory of networks.
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From page 93... ...
Developing modern software is not done through implementing a perfect software system once, at the start. Instead, the state of the art in software engineering urges iteration and architectural flexibility.
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From page 94... ...
Authentic applications should be included as part of systems research exploration at as high a level as possible in order to keep functional and performance requirements on a purposeful track. For the purposes of this report, notions of authenticity must encompass high-impact applicability to sustainability challenges.
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From page 95... ...
Past successful examples of this approach include language translation, Internet protocols, machine learning, object-oriented languages, and databases. The approaches discussed in Chapter 2 were not described in their most general terms.
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From page 96... ...
This change should include educating computer science students to achieve impact with computing, computational methods, and systems approaches in important domain-specific areas. Such a shift in culture would encourage these students to develop domain expertise and to collaborate directly with domain experts while in graduate school or in preparing for graduate work6 and to address such topics as modeling and predicting energy use and designing for reuse.
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From page 97... ...
The latter include the cross-training of students in multiple fields to enable them to bring a computer science perspective into other arenas. Authentic multidisciplinary work is challenging.7 Work will need to be done across disciplinary boundaries and incorporating experts from many disciplines, as well as individuals with deep expertise themselves in more than one discipline.
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From page 98... ...
• University systems -- a focus on bottom-up approaches affects how universities incentivize and create the infrastructure for faculty to pursue sustained multidisciplinary efforts. The computer science community has made progress in tenure and in the promotion of individuals who straddle disciplinary boundaries.
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From page 99... ...
Related to promotion is the question of appointments -- in what departments are multidisciplinary researchers appointed, and how can such appointments be handled so that the multidisciplinary nature of the researchers' work does not count against them in their home departments? • Funding agencies -- emphasizing bottom-up approaches may affect how agencies structure multidisciplinary programs.
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From page 100... ...
PRINCIPLE: There should be strong incentives at all stages of research for focusing on solving real problems whose solution can make a substantial contribution to sustainability challenges, along with in-depth metrics and evaluative criteria to assess progress. Another critical issue for structuring research is to build in evaluation tools for prioritizing efforts and evaluating meaningful impact.
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From page 101... ...
Scale analysis is critical to most information technology designs; it includes spatial scaling, temporal scaling, location scaling, and computational scaling. As demonstrated by the classic computer science talk 12As an example, although the challenges of sustainability are much broader than those related to climate change alone, in that domain a measurable impact is the goal of decreasing emissions so that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at or below a certain threshold.
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From page 102... ...
Quantifying sustainability results as contributed by computational methods is a daunting challenge, especially given the current lack of data for real-world systems. Focused efforts toward creating publicly available data repositories that could be used to compare the effect of methods on the performance metrics chosen may prove useful in some domains.
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From page 103... ...
CONCLUSION Meeting the challenges of sustainability, as noted in Chapter 1, will require more than information technology, applications of clever technology, and computer science research. Indeed, at the heart of many global sustainability challenges are questions of resource consumption and standards of living.
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From page 104... ...
One important consequence, which has been the focus of this report, is that advances in IT have become critical enablers of change in these systems. The goal of this report has been to shine a spotlight on areas where information technology innovation and computer science research can help, and to urge the computer research community to bring its approaches and methodologies to bear on these pressing global challenges.
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