This is a post by Emily Markert. See her bio at the bottom of this post.

Many of us have experienced car rides, both short and long, filled with small-talk, music played from a radio, or even podcasts. Although these media seem to do well enough at keeping us entertained, they often contribute little to any higher purpose. The vast amount of time people spend in transit has great potential to provide a meaningful experience, yet typically goes unutilized. Thus, we introduce RegionRadio, a spatially-aware storytelling tool aimed at supporting sustainability efforts through place-based education. The theory behind place-based education argues that immersing people in the history of a place can increase the connection they feel to it, and therefore increase the likelihood that they would act to protect it. In this way, RegionRadio exhibits place-based education by presenting stories to a user as they travel along a route; these stories are mandated to be relevant to the user’s current geospatial location, to contain topics related to environmental concepts, and eventually, to be customized to specific users’ preferences and histories. These stories are analyzed and filtered based on their topic, perceived interestingness, and continuity of the ‘playlist’ presented to the user throughout their journey. Use of RegionRadio is intended to be as simple as turning on the radio, but aims to develop ordinary citizens as environmental advocates by heightening appreciation of their surroundings through the telling of stories.

Although this project is unique in its sourcing and presentation of environmentally-focused place-based education,  we take inspiration from other work in spatially-based education, to include SCRABS and DETOUR.

The SCRABS system was designed by a group of researchers from the Cultural Heritage Information Systems national project, and is intended to increase cultural appreciation by presenting users with personalized, context-based information as they explore historic sites. The system has not yet been fully developed, but presents an ambitious design that can be further reviewed in this publication. This context-dependent recommendation of information aimed at increasing cultural appreciation is highly relevant to our own task, but applied to a different domain.

We consider another tool that is fully-developed, and has potential to convey place-based education. Detour is a growing platform offering the creation and taking of a novel type of audio tour. Taken on the user’s own smartphone, Detours can be taken in both indoor and outdoor spaces, and progress as the user moves through space, triggering narrations and other media along the way. While most existing tours published with Detour focus on urban areas, there is great potential in creating Detours for more natural settings. Allowing users to download tours that might lead them on a hike, through a National Park, or on a scenic drive would make place-based education easily accessible for Detour’s thousands of users.

To keep up with RegionRadio, stay tuned to this blog.

Region Radio a collaboration between the CompSustNet  lab at Vanderbilt University and the Space, Learnng, and Mobility lab at Vanderbilt University.  Research and development of Region Radio is supported by NSF Award #1521672 “Collaborative Research: CompSustNet: Expanding the Horizons of Computational Sustainability” and NSF Award #1623690 “EXP: Bridging Learning in Urban Extended Spaces (BLUES) 2.0”

Emily Markert is a Computer Science undergraduate at Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed herein are Emily’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. You can reach Emily at emily.markert@vanderbilt.edu.

This is a post by Mateus Winelmann. See Mateus’ bio at the bottom.

We often hear about major scientific discoveries in the media, like how scientists at CERN found the Higgs Boson or that a lifesaving drug like Harvoni, which can cure hepatitis C, is going to market. These are amazing breakthroughs, but oftentimes the process of discovery feels like something far removed from us. After all, most of us don’t have the training or resources to work on these kinds of projects. When cutting edge scientific research often requires years of specialized education and billions of dollars in funding (finding the Higgs Boson is estimated to have cost over US$13 billion), it doesn’t seem like something ordinary people can be a part of. That doesn’t have to be the case though! Citizen science consists of research done largely by the general public, typically without any significant cost for participants, and it can be incredibly valuable. To illustrate that, let’s talk about eBird.

eBird was launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, where the idea is to allow people to document their bird sightings. Bird watchers already tend to keep records of the birds they see or hear, and eBird allows them to make those observations available to educators and researchers across the world. Making that data available is already bearing fruit, with ornithologists at Cornell publishing a paper last year discussing the migratory strategies of birds, which is discussed in a New York Times article. The paper’s authors were able to document how different species of birds from different parts of the country migrate in different ways thanks to eBird. According to one of the paper’s articles, it would have cost researchers millions of dollars to collect this data through traditional tracking methods, and even then, the data would not have been as detailed.

You can learn more about eBird and how to contribute here. If you are interested in finding other citizen science projects, take a look at NatureNet and SciStarter. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can consider starting your own citizen science project. There are several tools and frameworks out there that can help you create and share a citizen science project, some of which are described here, and a few others I would suggest looking at are CitSci, crowdcrafting, Zooniverse, and iNaturalist. Starting your own project can be an ambitious undertaking, so I’d recommend taking the time to explore what projects are already out there to get an idea about how you might create your own project. While this page is directed at educators, it highlights a few important things to consider if you decide to create your own project. There is no shortage of things to be studied, so it’s just a matter of finding, or starting, a project that interests you.

Mateus Winelmann is a senior undergraduate student at Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed herein are Mateus’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. You can reach Mateus at mateus.winkelmann@vanderbilt.edu.

This is a post by Emily Markert. See her bio at the bottom of this post.

For pastoralists in East Africa, weather is key.  The threat of drought is recurrent on the African rangelands, and has the potential to kill vast numbers of livestock, throttling herders and their families into poverty.  This uncertainty has been a long-term concern in the region, and has led researchers Andrew Mude, Chris Barrett, and Michael Carter to develop a technology-based insurance program to protect these herders.  This Index-Based Livestock Insurance uses satellite data to monitor weather conditions in pastoral regions, and estimates livestock deaths.  Herders receive payouts based on these predictions.

A team led by Carla Gomes, Director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability, has also developed mobile applications that allow herders to report conditions, introducing an element of citizen science.  The program has been implemented in multiple countries, and this innovative combination of technology and finance has proven to be a success.  The researchers behind this insurance have received numerous awards for their efforts, and countless pastoralists have seen their livelihoods stabilized.  More information on this program can be found in this article from the Cornell Chronicle, in a press release on Dr. Andrew Mude’s receipt of the 2016 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, or in this blog post.

Emily Markert is a Computer Science  undergraduate at Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed herein are Emily’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. You can reach Emily at emily.markert@vanderbilt.edu.

Computational sustainability has been a special track at AAAI since 2011. The track invites “research papers on novel concepts, models, algorithms, and systems” at the nexus of AI, and environmental and societal sustainability. The 2017 special track cochairs were Bistra Dilkina of Georgia Institute of Technology and Sabine Storandt of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.

There were two CompSust awards given at the 2017 AAAI conference. The AAAI CompSust Best Paper Award was given to
Xiaojian Wu, Akshat Kumar, Daniel Sheldon, and Shlomo Zilberstein for “Robust Optimization for Tree-Structured Stochastic Network Design“. The CompSust Best Student Paper was given to Jiaxuan You, Xiaocheng Li, Melvin Low, David Lobell and Stefano Ermon for their paper “Deep Gaussian Process for Crop Yield Prediction Based on Remote Sensing Data.”

The AAAI CompSust Best Paper Committee included Alan Mackworth of the University of British Columbia, Zico Kolter of Carnegie Mellon UIniversity, and Amy McGovern of the University of Oklahoma.

The IAAAI conference, co-located with AAAI, also had computational sustainability representation, and CompSustNet researchers received an IAAI-17 Deployed Application Award for
“Phase-Mapper: An AI Platform to Accelerate High Throughput Materials Discovery” by  Yexiang Xue, Junwen Bai, Ronan Le Bras, Brendan Rappazzo, Richard Bernstein, Johan Bjorck, Liane Longpre, Santosh K. Suram, Robert B. van Dover, John Gregoire, and Carla P. Gomes.

Finally,  CompSustNet Executive Council member co-authored  the AAAI-17 Outstanding Paper “Label-Free Supervision of Neural Networks with Physics and Domain Knowledge” by Russell Stewart and Stefano Ermon. The paper describes research on using constraints to reduce the need for labeled data when learning to recognize and track objects. While not a computational sustainability paper per se, it a line of research that has clear implications for computational sustainability.

 

A complete list of computational sustainability representation at AAAI and IAAI is broader than the CompSust special track, and relevant papers from AAAI, IAAI, and the AAAI-17 Workshop on AI+OR for the Social Good (appended at the end) are listed here as a convenience. This list includes CompSustNet members and collaborators too, highlighted in blue.

• AI Education through Real-World Problems by Mark Crowley 

• Poster 1475: Species Distribution Modeling of Citizen Science Data as a Classification Problem with Class-Conditional Noise by Rebecca A. Hutchinson, Liqiang He, Sarah C. Emerson

• Poster 2250: Proper Proxy Scoring Rules by Jens Witkowski, Pavel Atanasov, Lyle H. Ungar, Andreas Krause

• Risk-Aware Planning: Methods and Case Study on Safe Driving Routes  by John Krumm, Eric Horvitz
• Predicting Fuel Consumption and Flight Delays for Low-Cost Airlines  by Yuji Horiguchi, Yukino Baba, Hisashi Kashima, Masahito Suzuki, Hiroki Kayahara, Jun Maeno
• Determining Relative Airport Threats from News and Social Media  by Rupinder P. Khandpur, Taoran Ji, Yue Ning, Liang Zhao, Chang-Tien Lu, Erik R. Smith, Christopher Adams, Naren Ramakrishnan

• Poster 2845: Extracting Urban Microclimates from Electricity Bills by Thuy Vu, D. S. Parker

• 1289: Deep Spatio-Temporal Residual Networks for Citywide Crowd Flows Prediction Junbo Zhang, Yu Zheng, Dekang Qi

• Phase-Mapper: An AI Platform to Accelerate High Throughput Materials Discovery  by Yexiang Xue, Junwen Bai, Ronan Le Bras, Brendan Rappazzo, Richard Bernstein, Johan Bjorck, Liane Longpre, Santosh K. Suram, Robert B. van Dover, John Gregoire, Carla P. Gomes

• Panelists: Eric Horvitz, Peter Mockel, Lynne Parker, and Gideon Mann. Moderated by Milind Tambe.

• Matrix Factorisation for Scalable Energy Breakdown by Nipun Batra, Hongning Wang, Amarjeet Singh, Kamin Whitehouse

• 3441: A Selected Summary of AI for Computational Sustainability by Douglas H. Fisher

• 788: On Human Intellect and Machine Failures: Troubleshooting Integrative Machine Learning Systemsby Besmira Nushi, Ece Kamar, Eric Horvitz, Donald Kossmann

• Poster 629: Combining Satellite Imagery and Open Data to Map Road Safety by Alameen Najjar, Shuníchi Kaneko, Yoshikazu Miyanaga
• Poster 573: Regularization in Hierarchical Time Series Forecasting with Application to Electricity Smart Meter Data by Souhaib Ben Taieb, Jiafan Yu, Mateus Neves Barreto, Ram Rajagopal

• Crowdsensing Air Quality with Camera-Enabled Mobile Devices by Zhengxiang Pan, Han Yu, Chunyan Miao, Cyril Leung
• Real-Time Indoor Localization in Smart Homes Using Semi-Supervised Learning by Negar Ghourchian, Michel Allegue-Martinez, Doina Precup
• ParkUs: A Novel Vehicle Parking Detection System by Pietro Carnelli, Joy Yeh, Mahesh Sooriyabandara, Aftab Khan

• 1751: Predicting Demographics of High-Resolution Geographies with Geotagged Tweets  by Omar Montasser, Daniel Kifer

• 353: POI2Vec: Geographical Latent Representation for Predicting Future Visitors by Shanshan Feng, Gao Cong, Bo An, Yeow Meng Chee

• Cracks Under Pressure? Burst Prediction in Water Networks Using Dynamic Metrics by Gollakota Kaushik, Abinaya Manimaran, Arunchandar Vasan, Venkatesh Sarangan, Anand Sivasubramaniam
• Optimal Sequential Drilling for Hydrocarbon Field Development Planning by Ruben Rodriguez Torrado, Jesus Rios, Gerald Tesauro

• Poster 1556: General Bounds on Satisfiability Thresholds for Random CSPs via Fourier Analysis  by Colin Wei, Stefano Ermon

• Poster 2970: Hindsight Optimization for Hybrid State and Action MDPs by Aswin Raghavan, Scott Sanner, Roni Khardon, Prasad Tadepalli, Alan Fern

• Oral 1922: Fine-Grained Car Detection for Visual Census Estimation by Timnit Gebru, Jonathan Krause, Yilun Wang, Duyun Chen, Jia Deng, Li Fei-Fei

By Cornell University Professor Chris Barrett
Christopher B. Barrett is the Deputy Dean and Dean of Academic Affairs of the College of Business and the Stephen B. & Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management and an International Professor of Agriculture in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, and a Fellow in the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University.

I first met Andrew when he was a first year Ph.D. candidate in Economics and he dropped by my office to chat about his interests in development, particularly in Africa. We had many stimulating conversations and I wound up supervising his dissertation, which ranged from applied microeconomic theory applied to questions of microfinance and informal lending for education – a common practice in rural Kenya – to empirical work on the functioning of farmers cooperatives based on original survey data he collected in rural Kenya.  Toward the end of his doctoral studies, Andrew worked as my research assistant on a project using data from the Kenyan government’s early warning system in the pastoral drylands. As we studied those data we uncovered systematic patterns that led us to believe that one might be able to predict herd losses statistically with some precision.

Another of my Ph.D. students, Sommarat Chantarat (Economics PhD 2009) then took up the challenge of designing an index-based livestock insurance (IBLI) contract in her dissertation, which won national and international awards. Dr. Chantarat, Dr. Mude – who moved to the Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) after completing his Cornell degree — and I worked closely with other partners to get IBLI designed and commercially piloted beginning in early 2010. We have had an extensive collaborative work agreement with Dr. Mude’s team at ILRI since 2008, which has supported Dr. Chantarat’s work as well as a more recent Ph.D., Nathan Jensen (AEM, 2014) whose dissertation evaluating the impacts and uptake of IBLI also won international recognition. This has been an especially enjoyable, fruitful, and impactful collaboration, which we are delighted continues quite actively today. The range of projects we have undertaken together has broadened over time, increasingly including computationally intensive work with Institute for Computational Sustainability  faculty and staff.

This work to help address systemic risk among some of the poorest and most marginalized populations in the world is tremendously important and exciting. It is an enormous privilege to work with a collaborator as talented, committed and kind as Dr. Mude.

Click here to read the  press release by International Livestock Research Institute, all rights reserved, 2016

Opinion originally published in The Hill on August 26, 2016
By Amanda D. Rodewald
With political divisiveness so often headlining the news, how refreshing it is to celebrate a centennial that demonstrates the power of countries coming together. One hundred years ago, the United States and Great Britain (for Canada) came together for birds when they signed the Migratory Bird Treaty, a convention to protect migratory birds across international borders.
At the time, populations of many birds were plummeting due to poorly regulated hunting. The plume trade, for which an estimated 5 million birds — especially waterbirds like egrets and herons — were killed each year for feathers to adorn hats, eventually incited people to action. In response, the landmark treaty and subsequent act to enforce it (the Migratory Bird Treaty Act) protected more than 1,100 migratory bird species by making it illegal to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill or sell live or dead birds, feathers, eggs and nests, except as permitted through hunting regulations for game birds.
What made this treaty particularly inspiring was that President Woodrow Wilson and King George V made the pledge amid the chaos of World War I. Soon after, the treaty was used as a model for similar agreements with Mexico (in 1936), Japan (1972) and Russia (1976). The Migratory Bird Treaties and subsequent international collaborations to conserve birds show how, when taken together, these global and hemispheric actions are far more than the sum of their parts. Collectively, these efforts are paving a path forward to protect birds and the ecosystems on which both birds and people depend.

International efforts are necessary to conserve migratory birds because birds don’t recognize geopolitical borders. Over the course of a year, songbirds, like the magnolia warbler, may spend 80 days breeding in the boreal forests of the northern U.S. and Canada, 30 days at resting and refueling sites during migration, and over 200 days overwintering in Latin American countries like Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.

Looking back at the last 100 years, it’s heartening to see that where we acted together, we had success. The plume trade was virtually halted, and populations of herons, egrets and ibises rebounded. Waterfowl, too, have benefited tremendously from multinational habitat restoration and careful hunting management, in part guided by the North American Waterfowl Management Plan and transformative legislation like the North American Wetlands Conservation Act that leveraged billions in funding for restoration and conservation of over 30 million acres in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Hunters and sportspeople were instrumental in this success, as they became the key drivers of conservation. Our investments have paid off: Populations of waterfowl and other waterbirds have increased, and the wetlands protected along the way now keep our drinking water clean and reduce flood risk.

But we need to do more. Unlike a century ago, when hunting decimated bird populations, today’s threats are more insidious. Birds are often collateral damage when habitat is lost and exotic species invade, and they are further endangered by collision with buildings and other structures, contamination, and even seemingly innocuous choices like letting our cats roam freely outdoors. These pervasive threats span geopolitical borders and, consequently, are best addressed through coordinated international action. Indeed, the recent “The State of North America’s Birds 2016” report indicates that without conservation action, over one-third of all North American bird species are at risk of extinction.

As we approach the next 100 years of conservation, we must remember that bird conservation is not only about birds; it’s about people, as well. We derive so many benefits from healthy bird populations, including pollination, seed dispersal, insect control and other ecosystem services. Birds also help us to understand the world around us and connect us with nature. And birds are a critical economic resource as well. Activities like hunting and birdwatching contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy alone. In fact, the North American Bird Conservation Initiative was originally created by the governments of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico in 1999 to recognize birds as an international “natural economic resource.”

The bottom line is that habitats healthy for birds are also healthy for people. We must work with diverse partners and stakeholders to identify conservation approaches, like sustainable forestry, that meet the needs of local communities and conserve birds and other species. Looking ahead, I believe that an integrated approach, where social and ecological needs are both accommodated, will be the hallmark of the next century of bird conservation.

Rodewald is the Garvin Professor of ornithology and director of conservation science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, faculty in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University, and faculty fellow at Cornell University’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. Views expressed in her column are hers alone and do not represent those of these institutions.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.

This is a post by Selina Chen. See her bio at the bottom of the post.

When I attended the 4th International Conference on Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, I was surprised at the large number of projects that came with some involvement in incentivizing users — whether by making the technology more accessible for the average user or coming up with ways to get people interested in using the product.  Before the conference, I had thought research consisted of the studying and making of things, and the issue of actually “selling” the product to public would be one which would be foisted off to the companies who decided to use the research.  Doubtless, my view was clouded by the fact that that I’d been raised by two biochemists, whose jobs consisted of developing and testing new drugs, which would then be marketed and sold by another company or department in that company.  Yet, as I learned at the conference, this cycle of create-and-pass-off was not so in the CompSust research community. Oftentimes, it became the job of researchers to figure out how to properly integrate sustainability into public life by paying attention to behavioral science, as well as technology.

In her blog post last week, Zimei Bian talked about how the new mobile app, Pokémon GO, is sweeping the world and how games, and the concept of fun in particular, can be used to engage the public in sustainability efforts.  Also mentioned was Cornell’s eBird project, a web and mobile application that uses crowdsourcing to document the presence and absence of various bird species around the world.  Through this app, birdwatchers can submit data on birds found in their region and can even take a look at hotspots in other regions.  The inexperienced birdwatcher or the casual user who just likes to use the app for kicks can also use Merlin, another mobile app developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in conjunction with eBird to help identify birds.

Video: A promotion for Merlin Bird ID App (1 minute 54 sec) — Credit to Cornell Lab of Ornithology

But the Cornell Lab of Ornithology didn’t stop there!  Taking advantage of public’s love of games and competition, the lab, in close collaboration with the Cornell Institute for Computational Sustainability,  also developed a treasure-hunting app to go along with eBird called Avicaching, described  in the talk by Yexiang Xue of Cornell University.   The game combines eBird and geocaching to encourage users to search for birds in underrepresented locations by letting you earn a variable number of points for each location visited.  Equipped with a leaderboard that updates in real-time, the game encourages users to visit places with the most ‘points’, helping to reduce eBird’s sampling bias and collect a more accurate distribution of the bird population for scientists to use.  Currently, the game is in the process of development, having only been deployed in two New York counties, but with the initial success seen by the game, it may potentially be expanded into other regions.

Though they were quite memorable for how they built on top of and supported each other, eBird, Merlin, and Avicaching were not the only wonderful projects aimed at selling computational sustainability to public that stuck out to me at the conference.

Another great example of a project that had some focus on public perception included a talk given by David Shmoys of Cornell University on the rebalancing problem found in bike sharing.  Keeping bike racks in balance amidst fluctuating demand is key; a full bike rack will prevent users from stashing their bikes when they’re done and an empty one will deter potential users.  Therefore, bike racks must be managed and optimized to provide an appropriate level of stock at any given time during the day.

Similarly, in taxi systems, there is also a demand problem and the issue of user perception.  In his talk on Smart Cities, Bo An of Nanyang Technological University described the peak time dilemma faced by many taxi users in cities: not being able to get a taxi. Because most taxis are priced by distance and because traffic is very slow during peak times, many taxi drivers will simply not work during those hours! The drivers do not believe that driving during peak times is cost effective.  Just like any other user, taxi drivers will attempt to game the system to their advantage, finding the best times to work to maximize their profit.  In order to “sell” the idea of working during peak periods, an incentive like raised fare prices must be brought to the table.  Further detail on this pricing and scheduling scheme can be found here. Its also important that we study possible rebound effects that might result from making “dysfunctional systems more tolerable“.

In a field like computational sustainability, which aims to touch all lives, human and otherwise, now and in the future, by building a better tomorrow, it is especially important that the public is “sold” on what we’re creating, lest the phrase “Everybody’s innovating, nobody’s integrating” becomes applied to us.  Fortunately, as seen by the conference, many researchers are already a step ahead and are proactive.

The projects mentioned here were only some of my favorite ones from the conference that touched on the idea of “selling” sustainability to the public. A complete list of talks hosted at the conference can be found here.

Selina Chen is a Computer Science  undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, with a love for sci-fi novels, superheroes, and art.  Currently, she’s having fun exploring the various ways art can be used to make data beautiful and engaging for the public.The opinions expressed herein are Selina’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. You can reach Selina at Selina.Chen@vanderbilt.edu.

 

I hiked around Ithaca, NY, the day before the 4th International Conference on Computational Sustainability  at Cornell University, and happened upon a knickknack shop, where I found a cache of 1963 Boy Scout merit badge pamphlets. I bought two that I didn’t have already — Gardening and Bookbinding. Gardening was one of the original merit badges that were introduced in 1911. The Gardening pamphlet, at least the 1963 printing, was written by Professor Paul Work of Cornell University, probably in the 1940s when the material was copyrighted. Professor Work died in 1959, after a distinguished career, which  included authoring The Tomato  —  you’ll see that Professor Work apparently liked to put faces to science, as part of the prefacing material to that book.

Image: The Gardening Merit Badge by Professor Paul Work. Click to enlarge.

I haven’t researched the history yet, but Boy Scout merit badges are my earliest recollection, as a scout myself, of formalized mechanisms of promoting lifelong and project-based learning through badging, and communicating science and technology to the public. Professor Work’s outreach on gardening may seem closer to hobbyist than to scientific material, but there is science outreach in that badge, and among the other 1911 merit badges were those that were clearly science outreach, including Astronomy, Ornithology (later Bird Study), Chemistry, and Electricity. Still others of the originals had sustainability connections as well, to include Conservation, Agriculture, and Forestry.

Image: Bridge in Cumberland Mountain State Park created by Lee Suydam for his Eagle Scout project (2005). Such projects, and there are many, are exemplars of project-based learning, though they are outside the scope of formal school curricula. Click to enlarge. Photo Credit: Douglas H. Fisher

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) are one of the very first environmental groups in America, and while BSA has been “dragged kicking and screaming” into inclusiveness on some social issues (see Treehugger article), they have been environmentalists consistently. The current crop of sustainability-relevant merit badges are many: Animal Science; Architecture; Bird Study; Composite Materials; Energy; Environmental Science; Fish and Wildlife Management; Forestry; Geology; Insect Study; Landscape Architecture; Mammal Study; Mining in Society; Nature; Nuclear Science; Oceanography; Plant Science; Reptile and Amphibian Study; Soil and Water Conservation; and Sustainability. Moreover, among the required badges for Eagle Scout is either Environmental Science or Sustainability (choose at least one).  A summary history of all merit badges, past and present, is an interesting read, …, for those interested (like me)!

After CompSust-2016, I went to Nashville’s Scout shop and picked up many of the study pamphlets for sustainability-related merit badges,  and was gratified to find attention to climate change in the most recent Sustainability merit badge (instituted 2013), and as importantly, global warming, climate change, and greenhouse effects have found their way into the study pamphlets of older merit badges like Chemistry, Weather, Environmental Science, and others. This article in Treehugger points to exactly the satisfaction and mild surprise that I found in the BSA environmental record since I was last active.

BSA has a long history of technology-relevant merit badges too (e.g Machinery, 1911 – 1995). In “my day” there were badges on Computers (1967-2014), Electronics (1963 – ), Engineering (1967 – ), which has morphed and grown to include Digital Technology; Robotics; Programming; Geocaching; Game Design; Entrepreneurship; and Graphic Arts.

This brings me to a  goal of infusing computational sustainability  into the BSA merit badge system. Our NSF-funded network, CompSustNet,  aspires to introduce and nurture outreach in K-12 that reaches far and wide, and that lasts well beyond the network’s NSF funding period. Scouting has a long and proven history of science and engineering outreach (as well as Arts and Humanities outreach — just look at the merit badge list), so its no surprise that we are investigating the outreach possibilities with scouting. While I have focused on BSA, which is integral to my personal story, I am learning about Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) and their badging system, with goals for outreach in GSUSA as well.

Web searches with keywords such as “NSF” (or “National Science Foundation”), “Boy Scouts” and “merit badge” show that there are NSF grants with broader impacts plans that include activities with scouting, and merit badge workshops and study groups (e.g., “CAREER: Computational Modeling of Microstructure Evolution during Vapor Deposition“).  Additional poking around finds that there are museums around the country that work with scouts as part of the museum’s disciplinary outreach (e.g., Nashville’s Adventure Science Museum). Museums and other institutions can have their own (digital) badging systems, and we are currently designing the desiderata, requirements, and graphic designs of CompSust badges.

We can aspire to create BSA and GSUSA badges on Computational Sustainability, but in the near term, our focus is on workshop materials that scouts and their mentors can use to integrate computing into satisfaction of sustainability-themed badge requirements, and to integrate sustainability into computing-themed badges.

One “secret formula” of BSA, at least in my experience, is that the “library” research involved in merit badges, ecology-themed and otherwise, is side by side with in-the-world activities (including merit badges and Eagle projects) in Backpacking; Cooking; Gardening; Scuba Diving; Search and Rescue; Climbing; Fishing; Citizenship in the Community, Nation, and the World; and so many others — that amalgamates interests in nature, citizenship, science, and humanities — at least it did in me.

Image: Glendora Explorer Post 494 scouts and leaders hiking Mount Whitney (circa 1974). Click to enlarge. Photo Credit: Douglas H. Fisher

Infusing computational sustainability into scouts (and other badging systems and K-12 institutions) appears very promising. There will be other outreach efforts by CompSustNet that are intended as long-lasting and consequential as well — we will be posting these activities to this blog,

Thanks to Professor Paul Work too, for being a pioneer in communicating science to the public. It was serendipity that I discovered him, but serendipity that was made more probable by a curiosity about and appreciation for the place I was in.

Douglas H. Fisher is CompSustNet’s Director of Outreach, Education, Diversity, and Synthesis. The opinions expressed herein are Doug’s and not necessarily those of Cornell University. Contact Doug at douglas.h.fisher@vanderbilt.edu.