TITLE:
|
Climate Smart Computing: A Perspective
|
PRESENTER:
|
Shashi Shekhar :
Biography (
100 words,
400 words ),
Picture (
1 ,
2 )
|
AFFILIATION:
|
Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Minnesota.
|
Webpages:
|
official ,
personal ,
wikipedia entry
|
VIDEOS:
SLIDES:
ABSTRACT:
Climate change is a societal grand challenge and many nations have signed the Paris Agreement (2015) aiming for net-zero
emission (a.k.a. Carbon neutrality) around 2050. The computing community can make many contributions. We can help improve
climate resilience, lower emissions in other economic sectors (e.g., energy, transportation, agriculture) and accelerate
absorption of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in nature. Also, we can reduce computing emissions (about 2% of total in 2020 from IoT,
pervasive devices, networks, data centers, etc.). Further, we can provide new tools for advancing scientific understanding and
for GHG monitoring, reporting and verification.
However, traditional computing methods face major challenges. First, computational models are approximations of the natural
world, and it is important to reduce approximation error due to the high cost of errors besides speeding up computations. In
addition, there are significant interactions and optimizing for a goal (e.g., mitigation) or a subsystem (e.g., food) may have
unintended consequences for other goals (e.g., adaptation) or subsystems (e.g., water). Moreover, there are significant
stochastic and systematic uncertainties in future projections. Further, machine learning is overwhelmed due to
non-stationarity (e.g., climate change), data paucity (e.g., rare climate events), high cost of ground truth collection, and
the need to observe natural laws (e.g., conservation of mass). Furthermore, addressing climate often requires deep and
sustained interdisciplinary and multi-sector collaboration.
This talk shares a perspective on the climate-smart computing challenges and opportunities based on multi-decade
scholarly activities such as the recent
AI-CLIMATE, the National AI Research Institute for Climate-Land Interactions,
Mitigation, Adaptation, Tradeoffs and Economy.
KEYWORDS:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
This work is supported by
AFRI Competitive Grant No. 2023-67021-39829 / Project No. MINW-2023-03616 from the
USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture as well as the National AI Research Institute program of the National
Science Foundation.
RESOURCES
-
NSF Workshop on Sustainable Computing for Sustainability, April 16th-17th, 2024.
-
AI teeters between climate boon and energy burden , ciphernews.com, March 20th, 2024.
- Jens Malmodin et al.
ICT sector electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions - 2020 outcome,
Telecommunications Policy, 2024, 102701, ISSN 0308-5961,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2023.102701
- L. Belkhir et al.,
Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 and recommendations ,
Journal of Cleaner Production,
Volume 177,
2018,
Pages 448-463,
ISSN 0959-6526,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.239.
-
upcoming Special issue on Special Issue on Sustainability and Computing,
Communications of the ACM .
-
AI-CLIMATE Institute: Curbing Climate Change with Artificial Intelligence ,
Soundbyte Magazine,
Computer Science and Engineering Department, University of Minnesota,
Oct. 2023.(z.umn.edu/Soundbyte2023)
-
U of M looks to use AI to create more climate-safe farming practices,
KARE11, May 16th, 2023.
-
NSF on Chien Grand Challenge for Sustainability, Communications of the ACM, May 2023.
-
The Untapped Potential of Computing and Cognition in Tackling Climate Change,
NAE Perspectives, National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, April 25, 2023.
- David Rolnick et al.,
Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning , ACM Comput. Surv. 55, 2, Article 42, February 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3485128.
- M. Yang et al.,
Data Mining Challenges and Opportunities to Achieve Net Zero Carbon Emissions: Focus on Electrified
Vehicles, SIAM Intl. Conference on Data Mining, 2023.
- B. Jayaprakash, et al.,
Towards Carbon-Aware Spatial Computing: Challenges and Opportunities, In I-GUIDE Forum, Institute
for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment, 2023, 10.5703/1288284317678.
(youtube talk)
- A. Chien,
Editorial: Computing Grand Challenge for Sustainability, Communications of the ACM, Oct. 2022.
-
Track 4: Climate-Smart Computing to Address a Grand Challenge Facing Our Changing Planet,
Co-chairs: K. Larson and S. Shekhar,
CRA Bi-annual Conference at Snowbird ,
July 20th, 2022.
-
Computing Research for the Climate Crisis, Computing Research News, 33(8), Sept. 2021.
- N. Bliss et al.,
Computing Research for the Climate Crisis,
Computing Community Consortium (CCC), Computing Research Association, 2021
-
Data Science for Earth: An Earth Day Report ,
ACM SIGKDD Explor. Newsl. 22, 1 (June 2020), https://doi.org/10.1145/3400051.3400055
-
Earth Day 2020: Using Computing to Address Grand Challenges Facing Our Planet,
Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, Computing Research Association,
April 22nd, 2020 .
- S. Shekhar and P. Vold,
Spatial Computing, The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, 2020 (ISBN: 9780262538046).
-
Collaborative Geodesign and Spatial Optimization for Fragment-Free Land Allocation,
Y. Xie, B. Runck, S. Shekhar, L. Kne, D. Mulla, N. Jordan, and P. Wringa,
ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2017, 6(7), 226;
https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi6070226.
- S. Shekhar, S. Feiner, and W. Aref,
Spatial Computing, Communications of the ACM, 59(1):72-81, January, 2016.
-
NSF Workshop to Identify Interdisciplinary Data Science Approaches and Challenges to Enhance Understanding of Interactions
of Food Systems with Energy and Water Systems, Computing Research News (ISSN 1069-384X), Computing Research Association,
27(10), November 2015.
-
Computing and Climate,
J. H. Faghmous, V. Kumar and S. Shekhar,
in IEEE/APA Computing in Science \& Engineering
(Guest editors introduction to the special issue on Computing and Climate), vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 6-8,
Nov.-Dec. 2015, doi: 10.1109/MCSE.2015.114.
-
Capitol Hill Presentation on Deconstructing Precision Agriculture, Computing Research News, Vol. 27, No.4, April 2015.
-
ACM-climate mailing list , http://bit.ly/30noYhO
- Related Webpages: