Computational Sustainability: Computing for a Better World and a Sustainable Future

by Carla Gomes, Thomas Dietterich, Christopher Barrett

We illustrate some of our computational sustainability research, which has focused on three general sustainability themes: Balancing environmental and socioeconomic needs; biodiversity and conservation; and, renewable and sustainable energy and materials. The research is also centered on three broad computational themes: optimization, dynamical models, and simulation; data and machine learning; and, multi-agent systems, crowdsourcing, and citizen science

11 pages, ebook

First published September 1, 2019

Reviews

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting introductory overview of some Computer Science applications to a few of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Their concluding remarks are worth quoting:

We have highlighted how computational sustainability problems encompass a combination of distinguishing aspects that make them unique in scale, impact, complexity, and richness, posing new challenges and opportunities for computing and information science, leading to transformative research directions. One of our key goals has been to identify classes of computational problems that cut across a variety of sustainability (and other) domains. Given the universality of computational thinking, findings in one domain can be transferred to other domains. Examples of high-level cross-cutting computational problem classes [...] include spatiotemporal modeling and prediction for bird conservation, poverty mapping, and weather mapping; sequential decision making for managing (renewable) resources, designing scientific experiments, managing invasive species, and pastoralism interventions; pattern decomposition with complex constraints for phase map identification in materials discovery, identification of elephant and bird calls from audio recordings, inferring plant phenotypes from hyper spectral data and scientific topic modeling; active learning [...], for scientific experimentation and sensor placement, including citizen science, and crowdsourcing, and games for mechanism design for providing incentives for citizen scientists, placing patrols and drones to combat poaching and illegal fishing, or incentivizing bikers to balance bike stations. [...] In this article, we focused on computational sustainability research examples from CompSustNet, a computational sustainability research network involving a large number of researchers. [...] Computational sustainability is a two-way street: it injects computational ideas, thinking, and methodologies into addressing sustainability questions but it also leads to foundational contributions to computing and information science by exposing computer scientists to new challenging problems, formalisms, and concepts from other disciplines. Just as sustainability issues intersect an ever-increasing cross-section of emerging scientific application domains, computational sustainability broadens the scope and diversity of computing and information science while having profound societal impact.