{"id":945,"date":"2009-11-09T14:56:09","date_gmt":"2009-11-09T18:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=945"},"modified":"2009-11-09T14:56:09","modified_gmt":"2009-11-09T18:56:09","slug":"climate-change-informatics-research-areas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/11\/climate-change-informatics-research-areas\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change Informatics Research Areas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve finally managed to post the <a title=\"Outcomes page from WSRCC\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.toronto.edu\/wsrcc\/Outcomes.html\" target=\"_blank\">results of our workshop on Software Research and Climate Change<\/a>, held at <a title=\"Onward conference site\" href=\"http:\/\/onward-conference.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Onward\/Oopsla<\/a> last month. We did lots of brainstorming, and attempted to cluster the ideas, as you can see in the photos of our sticky notes.<\/p>\n<p>After the workshop, I attempted to boil down the ideas even further, and came up with three clusters of research:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Green IT (i.e. optimize power consumption of software and all things controlled\u00a0by software (also known as &#8220;make sure ICT is no longer part of the problem&#8221;).\u00a0Examples of research in this space include:\n<ul>\n<li>Power aware computing (better management of power in all\u00a0devices from mobile to massive installations).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Green controllers (smart software to optimize and balance power\u00a0consumption in everything that consumes power).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Sustainability as a first\u00a0class requirement in software system design.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Computer-Supported Collaborative Science (also known as eScience &#8211;\u00a0i.e. software to support and accelerate inter-disciplinary science in\u00a0climatology and related disciplines). Examples of research in this space include:\n<ul>\n<li>Software engineering tools\/techniques for climate modellers<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Data management for data-intensive science<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Open Notebook science (electronic notebooks)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Social network tools for knowledge finding and expertise mapping<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Smart ontologies<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Software to improve global collective decision making (which includes\u00a0everything from tools to improve public understanding of science\u00a0through to decision support at multiple levels: individual, community,\u00a0government, inter-governmental,&#8230;). Examples of research in this space include:\n<ul>\n<li>Simulations, games, educational software to support public\u00a0understanding of the science (usable climate science)<\/li>\n<li>massive open collaborative decision support<\/li>\n<li>carbon accounting for corporate decision making<\/li>\n<li>systems analysis of sustainability in human activity systems\u00a0(requires multi-level systems thinking)<\/li>\n<li>better understanding of the processes of social epistemology<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>My personal opinion is that (1) is getting to be a <a title=\"There's even a &quot;Green IT for Dummies&quot; book\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dummies.com\/store\/product\/Green-IT-For-Dummies.productCd-0470386886.html\" target=\"_blank\">crowded<\/a> field, \u00a0which is great, but will only yield up to about <a title=\"estimate of 15% BAU emissions comes from the Smart 2020 report\" href=\"http:\/\/www.smart2020.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">15%<\/a> of the <a title=\"Human society can afford to burn about 1 trillion tonnes of carbon ever. Then we have to stop. Completely.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v458\/n7242\/full\/nature08019.html\" target=\"_blank\">100%<\/a> reduction in carbon emissions we&#8217;re aiming for. (2) is has been mapped\u00a0out as part of several initiatives in the UK and US on <a title=\"The Environmental E-science revolution\" href=\"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=668\" target=\"_blank\">eScience<\/a>, but \u00a0there&#8217;s still a huge amount to be done. (3) is pretty much a green \u00a0field (no pun intended) at the moment. It&#8217;s this third area that \u00a0fascinates me the most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve finally managed to post the results of our workshop on Software Research and Climate Change, held at Onward\/Oopsla last month. We did lots of brainstorming, and attempted to cluster the ideas, as you can see in the photos of our sticky notes. After the workshop, I attempted to boil down the ideas even further, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":392,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,52],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/392"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":947,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions\/947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}