{"id":97,"date":"2009-03-19T16:42:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-19T20:42:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/?p=97"},"modified":"2009-03-27T13:17:19","modified_gmt":"2009-03-27T17:17:19","slug":"how-can-we-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.easterbrook.ca\/steve\/2009\/03\/how-can-we-help\/","title":{"rendered":"How can we help?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A group of us at the lab, led by Jon Pipitone<\/a>, 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<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n

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…).<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Help the climate scientists<\/strong>\u00a0to develop a better understanding of climate processes.\n