Alan Mackworth - Computation and Sustainability: Beyond Green IT

Alan Mackworth presents as part of the UBC Department of Computer Science's Faculty Lecture Series, November 7, 2013.

Our planet is suffering global crises of poverty and inequity, overdevelopment, environmental degradation, climate change, healthcare, educational disparities and aging demographics. Given these crises of sustainability, does computer science have anything to offer? Computation can be seen as inherently sustainable: replacing atoms by bits. And there are many initiatives in green computing that certainly are significant. However, beyond those, an interdisciplinary field of computational sustainability is emerging. It aims to develop computational models and methods for decision making concerning the management and allocation of resources to help solve problems of sustainability. Moreover, it is also focused on the design of computational systems that support sustainability directly.
Sustainable systems must satisfy physical, chemical, biological, psychological, economic, and social constraints. Consider constraints such as those imposed by energy supply, water resources, waste management, greenhouse gas emissions, ocean acidity, climate, ecological footprint, biodiversity, habitat, harvesting and global equity. A sustainable system is one that operates within an envelope defined by the constraints it should satisfy. Sustainability is constraint satisfaction.
In this talk, I shall sketch the constraint-based computational sustainability framework, outline the dimensions of the design space for computational sustainability systems, describe the design of several systems and speculate on the scope of future developments.

Видео Alan Mackworth - Computation and Sustainability: Beyond Green IT канала UBC Computer Science