Announcements

• Wednesday Jan 5, 2011: Draft course outline posted. Comments welcome!.

About the Course

This introductory course will explore the contribution of computer science to the challenge of climate change, including: the role of computational models in understanding earth systems, the numerical methods at the heart of these models, and the software engineering techniques by which they are built, tested and validated; challenges in management of earth system data, such as curation, provenance, meta-data description, openness and reproducibility; tools for communication of climate science to broader audiences, such as simulations, games, educational software, collective intelligence tools, and the challenges of establishing reputation and trustworthiness for web-based information sources; decision-support tools for policymaking and carbon accounting, including the challenges of data collection, visualization, and trade-off analysis; the design of green IT, such as power-aware computing, smart controllers and the development of the smart grid.

The aim is to bring a broad range of computer science graduate students together, to explore how their skills and knowledge in various areas of computer science can be applied to a societal grand challenge problem. The course will equip the students with a basic understanding of the challenges in tackling climate change, and will draw a strong link between the students’ disciplinary background and a series of inter-disciplinary research questions. The course crosscuts most areas of computer science.

General Course Resources

• Classes: Fridays, 10am-12pm, BA3187 (until January 28th 2011) and then Thursdays, 10am-12pm, BA5256 except for:
  • NOTE: for the week of Feb 14 only, we'll meet on Wed rather than Thursday: Wed Feb 16, 11am-1pm, BA7172
  • NOTE: No seminar in the week of Feb 21, as it's reading week.
• Course discussion board (coming soon)

Seminar Notes & Weekly Readings

All teaching materials on this website are available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, except where noted otherwise. Links to journal articles should work from anywhere on campus, via the U of T institutional subscription - let me know if they don't. Please respect the copyrights on all material on this site.

Part 1: The Science of Climate Change

• Week 1: Introduction, Overview, and Motivation for the Course.
  • By way of introduction, see the paper "Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge"
  • See also my "Software Engineering for the Planet" talk: part 1 and part 2 and the talk on Ethics of Climate by Ray Pierrehumbert. For good primers on climate change, I would recommend the books by Archer and Rahmstorf, and by Houghton. Or you can go directly to the last IPCC reports.
    
• Week 2: Computational Challenges in Climate Science
  • Introductory papers: Slingo et al "Developing the next-generation climate system models"; and Washington et al "The computational future for climate and Earth system models"
• Week 3: Software and Data Challenges in Climate Science
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar!): Easterbrook & Johns "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change"; and Dunlap et al, "Earth System Curator: Metadata infrastructure for climate modeling"

Part 2: Frameworks for Thinking about Climate Change

• Week 4: Ethical Frameworks - a top down view
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar!): Gardiner, "Ethics and Global Climate Change", and Jamieson, "Climate change, responsibility, and justice"
• See also: Gardiner, "A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics and the Problem of Moral Corruption", and the books by Garvey "The Ethics of Climate Change" and by Gardiner et al, "Climate Ethics: Essential Readings"
• Week 5: Community Action - a bottom up view
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar!): Paul Stern "Towards a Coherent Theory of Environmentally Significant Behaviour" and Pat Murphy, Chapter 8 of "Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change"
  • See also: Larry Lohmann, "Climate as Investment" and Rob Hopkins "The Transition Handbook" (chapter 10 is a good introduction to the transition concept)
• Week 6: Computational Thinking and Systems Thinking
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar!): Jeanette Wing, "Computational Thinking", and Martin Reynolds "Ecological conversations and systems thinking".
  • See also: Reynolds and Holwell, "Introducing Systems Approaches", and Meadows "Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system", along with the classic books by Donella Meadows, "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" and Weinberg "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking"

Part 3: Knowledge Management and Decision Support

• Week 7: Usable Climate Science: Retrieval, Reputability, and Usability
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar!): Dilling, "Creating Usable Science: Opportunities and constraints for climate knowledge use and their implications for science policy", Klein et al, "The Climate Collaboratorium: Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Address Climate Change Issues" and de Waard et al, "Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims".
  • See also: Agrawala et al, "Integrating Climate Forecasts and Societal Decision Making : Challenges to an Emergent Boundary Organization"
• Week 8: Open Science, Open Source, Citizen Science
  • Introductory Papers (read these before the seminar!): Barrett and Sowe, "Could Climate Science Become Open Source?", Willinsky "The Unacknowledged Convergence of Open Source, Open Access, and Open Science", and Malone et al "The Collective Intelligence Genome",
  • See also: Tovey "Mass collaboration, open source, and social entrepreneurship", Masum and Tovey "Given Enough Minds...Bridging the Ingenuity Gap" Carroll et al "Distributing Science", and Rood, "Open Source Communities, What Are the Problems? Open Climate Models (Blog post)"
  • Bonus - we also talked in class about the Stabilization Wedges idea: the stabilization triangle and the idea of stabilization wedges (from Princeton U's Carbon Mitigation Initiative); A more recent update with more wedges (from National Geographic - see also the learn more section);Another view of a set of possible stabilization wedges (from Stenger's blog)
• Week 9: Computational Sustainability (incl. planning and decision support):
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar!): Gomes, "Computational Sustainability Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy, and Society"; Ermon et al, "Playing games against nature: optimal policies for renewable resource allocation"
  • See also: Dilina & Gomes "Solving Connected Subgraph Problems in Wildlife Conservation" and Sheldon et al "Maximizing the Spread of Cascades Using Network Design"

Part 4: Computing and Sustainability

• Week 10: Carbon Accounting and Building the Smart Grid
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar): Ramchurn et al "Agent-Based Homeostatic Control for Green Energy in the Smart Grid"...
  • See also: Lynne Kiesling's introduction to the smart grid (in five parts)
• Week 11: Green IT and power-aware computing
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar): Murugesan, "Harnessing Green IT: Principles and Practices" and the GeSI report, "Using ICTs to Tackle Climate Change"
  • See also: Barroso and Holzle "The case for energy-proportional computing", the WWF report "From Green IT to Greening with IT", Pamlin and Szomolányi, "Saving Climate at the Speed of Light", The Climate Group "Smart 2020 report"
• Week 12: Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
  • Introductory papers (read these before the seminar): Bendick et al, "Choosing Carbon Mitigation Strategies Using Ethical Deliberation"; Wilson and Dowlatabadi, "Models of Decision Making and Residential Energy Use"
  • Background readings: Bodansky et al, "International Climate Efforts Beyond 2012: A Survey of Approaches"
  • See also: Gregory et al, "Acceptable Input: Using Decision Analysis to Guide Public Policy Deliberations"; McDaniels et al "Fostering resilience to extreme events within infrastructure systems: Characterizing decision contexts for mitigation and adaptation"

Assignments

1. Participation in the course seminars, including leading the discussion on one of the weekly readings (10%)
2. Term project: Write a proposal for a research project in climate change informatics. The proposal should describe how you would apply ideas from advanced computer science research to tackle some aspect of climate change. The proposal should include a description of the background work you are drawing on, a plan for the research itself, and details of any collaborative relationships that will be needed with experts in other disciplines.
   • Plan a research project that would take 1-3 years to complete, with a team of at least one grad student and at least one professor. Plan for a bigger team if you like.
   • Think about research that would contribute to computer science (e.g. by stretching the capabilities of existing techniques) as well as offering potential solutions to problems in some aspect of climate science, climate policy, green engineering, sustainability, etc.
   • Write up your proposal using the outline for an NSERC Strategic Grant. You don't need to provide details on costings, nor on the research team; hence the only sections of NSERC's form 101that are relevant are the "summary for the public release" (1/2 page), and the main proposal (max 11 pages including figures and references). Follow the NSERC formatting instructions!
   • Due Date: April 29, 2011