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CompSust Events This Summer

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There are a number of events this summer for researchers in Computational Sustainability to meet and share their ideas. Here are just a few I’m aware of, if you know of other meetings or related events let us know in the comments!

AAAI 2013

The Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-13) will be held July 14–18, 2013 in Bellevue, Washington, USA. This is a top AI conference and once again there will be a specialized track on topics in Computational Sustainability, see the accepted papers from that track here.

IJCAI 2013

The Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence August 3-9, 2013 in Beijing, China. This year’s IJCAI also has a special track on CompSust, you can see those and all the papers here, titles only so far.

Future Posts – Conference Paper Summaries

We’re going to be inviting some authors from upcoming conferences to write a post for the blog explaining their work to be posted in the near future. If you have a paper at this year’s AAAI or IJCAI and are willing to write a post get in touch with me crowley@eecs.oregonstate.edu. The idea is to have high level descriptions of some of the variety and depth of research going on at the intersections of computation, ecology, optimization, sustainability and machine learning. Hopefully, the writeups can be short and understandable by the general public while providing a enough information for experts to get the general idea of the approach being used. Pretty pictures and real world examples encouraged!

Community

Google+ is really becoming an online home for many scientific communities. Two of the largest Community groups are general science based both with over 80,000 people sharing news and talking about science. One of them recently had an interesting live video forum with Al Gore about climate change. There are also other more focussed groups that are very relevant to our community and regularly have fascinating content: BioCultural Landscapes & Seascapes, Citizen Science Projects and Machine Learning for example.  Our own CompSust G+ community is small but we haven’t had a lot of content. So, if you are on G+ and find interesting stories or have updates and thoughts on your own research I encourage you to share it to our community or to share links to groups you find useful.

Computational Sustainability at AAAI-12

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Next week is the next event in the summer of CompSust conferences. The Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) is being held next week (July 22-26) in Toronto, Canada. So here’s a little preview of what to expect and how to get the most out of it.

The schedule for the entire conference can be found here. To get a taste of the kind of topics being covered you can take a look at  this excellent review of the papers from last year (complete with an handy chart) by Douglas Fisher from Vanderbilt University. Note that one of the two best papers from the entire conference was from the CompSust Track (“Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence Track: Dynamic Resource Allocation in Conservation Planning” by Daniel Golovin, Andreas Krause, Beth Gardner, Sarah J. Converse, Steve Morey).

CompSust track papers from last year's AAAI-11. Courtesy of Douglas Fisher.

There isn’t a handy chart for this year’s conference yet but a quick look at the topics shows that many of the same topics will be covered as well as some new additions. A brief look at the sustainability topics includes: modelling climate change, ocean eddy monitoring, air pollution, forest management, wildlife conservation design, invasive species and infectious disease control,  power grid management and battery output prediction and control. Just from the titles the range of computational methods used includes at least : linear programming, Q-learning, Lagrangian relaxation, Inverse RL and Bayesian ensemble prediction.

Of course the point of having this track at the AAAI conference is to help broaden the field of AI research and showcase a large cluster of multi-disciplinary collaboration that is already going on. I can tell you that from last year’s conference, the CompSust sessions have a different feel than the other parallel tracks since there are a variety of computational methods being discussed within the same session whether it be on energy management or ecological planning. So if you want a change of pace from the method focussed tracks consider stopping by a CompSust session.

Twitter

This conference will also be the launch of the official Twitter account for the Computational Sustainability field, @compsust. So follow us at @compsust for the latest updates on the conference or search for the #compsust or #aaai12 tags for posts about what interesting research people are talking about and share your own thoughts.

Google+

For discussion that needs more than 140 characters  you could also sign up for the Google+ event for the whole AAAI conference where you can discuss anything going on and meet up with people.

Mailing List

If you aren’t already on the yahoo groups mailing list for computational sustainability make sure you subscribe. There are announcements about conferences, journal deadlines and relevant science news for the community.

That’s all for now. See you next week!