Computational Sustainability at AAAI 2013

Bellevue Skyline Photo Credit Michael Walmsley.

The Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13) convenes next week in Bellevue, Washington USA. 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 CompSust presentations 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.As in the past, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is graciously supporting best paper awards for the CompSust track, which will be announced at the opening ceremony on Tuesday, July 16.

Douglas Fisher

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