The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Douglas H. Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. This year Doug and Carla Gomes (Cornell University) are co-chairing the Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence (AI) track at the Twenty-Seventh Conference on Artificial Intelligence on July 14-18, 2013 in Bellevue, Washington. In this entry, Doug highlights the upcoming Computing Community Consortium sponsored track.
The Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13) convenes next week in Bellevue, Washington. For the third consecutive year there will be a special track on Computational Sustainability, a nascent and growing field of computing that is concerned with the application of computer science principles, methods, and tools to problems of environmental and societal sustainability. This is not a one-way street, however, because sustainability problems force computer scientists into new theory, as well as new practice. For example, sustainability problems require extraordinary attention to solution robustness (e.g., so that a so-called optimal solution doesn’t catastrophically fail with an environmental change) and issues of uncertainty, ranging from uncertainties in environmental sensor readings to uncertainties in the budget awarded by a state legislative body for wildlife management!
The 16 papers of the Computational Sustainability (CompSust) track of AAAI (http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2013/aaai13accepts.php#Sustainability) cover sustainability problems in natural environment, to include various forms of resource management (e.g., species management, wildfire control), and the built environment (e.g., smart grid, building energy usage). The papers are arranged in four presentation sessions, all on Thursday, July 18, 2013. These sessions are organized by AI themes of MDPs and sequential processes, optimization and search, data mining, and multi agent systems.
Please be sure to check back here shortly after the conference to see the best paper award winners, who will receive travel awards from the Computing Community Consortium.
If you are interested in running a CCC-sponsored Challenges & Visions track for an upcoming research conference or workshop you are organizing, please e-mail us!
