Serendipity

A group of us at the lab, led by Jon Pipitone, has been meeting every Tuesday lunchtime (well almost every Tuesday) for a few months, to brainstorm ideas for how software engineers can contribute to addressing the climate crisis. Jon has been blogging some of our sessions (here, here and here).

This week we attempted to create a matrix, where the rows are “challenge problems” related to the climate crisis, and the columns are the various research areas of software engineering (e.g. requirements analysis, formal methods, testing, etc…). One reason to do this is to figure out how to run a structured brainstorming session with a bigger set of SE researchers (e.g. at ICSE). Having sketched out the matrix, we then attempted to populate one row with ideas for research projects. I thought the exercise went remarkably well. One thing I took away from it was that it was pretty easy to think up research projects to populate many of the cells in the matrix (I had initially thought the matrix might be rather sparse by the time we were done).

We also decided that it would be helpful to characterize each of the rows a little more, so that SE researchers who are unfamiliar with some of the challenges would understand each challenge enough to stimulate some interesting discussions. So, here is an initial list of challenges (I added some links where I could). Note that I’ve grouped them according to who immediate audience is for any tools, techniques, practices…).

1. Help the climate scientists to develop a better understanding of climate processes.
   • Access to datasets
   • Managing metadata
   • Building climate (simulation) models
   • SE skills for climate scientists
   • Verification and Validation of computational models
   • Sharing tacit knowledge (e.g. awareness tools, recommender systems, etc)
   • Visibility into other research groups (Open science)
   • Collaboration support tools (“Computer-Supported Collaborative Science”)
2. Help the educators to to teach kids about climate science – how the science is done, and how we know what we know about climate change.
   • Support hands-on computational science (e.g. an online climate lab with building blocks to support construction of simple simulation models)
   • Global warming games
3. Help the journalists & science writers to raise awareness of the issues around climate change for a broader audience.
   • Better public understanding of climate processes
   • Better public understanding of how climate science works
   • Visualizations of complex earth systems
   • connect data generators (eg scientists) with potential users (e.g. bloggers)
4. Help the policymakers to design, implement and adjust a comprehensive set of policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
   • decision support for policy wonks (e.g. Climate Interactive)
   • information systems to access relevant datasets to collect evidence on how well policies are working
   • policy engineering
   • V&V of models used in government policy making
5. Help the political activists who put pressure on governments to change their policies, or to get better leaders elected when the current ones don’t act.
   • Social networking tools for activitists
   • Tools for persuasion (e.g. visualizations) and community building (e.g. Essence)
6. Help individuals and communities to lower their carbon footprints.
   • Decision support tools that provide rationale for changes likely to have the most impact (e.g. Climate Collaboratorium)
   • Label goods with environmental impact information (e.g.greenscanner)
   • Social networking tools to support community action
   • Feedback tools to show immediate impact
   • Persuasion tools (how do we get people to change their behaviour)
   • psychology of climate change
7. Help the engineers who are developing new technologies for renewable energy and energy efficiency systems.
   • green IT
   • Smart energy grids
   • waste reduction
   • renewable energy
   • town planning
   • green buildings/architecture
   • transportation systems (better public transit, electric cars, etc)
   • etc