University of British Columbia

Department of Computer Science

CPSC 530M

 Computational Sustainability

Winter Session 2013-14, Term 2

Basics

Computational Sustainability

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Computational sustainability is an emerging interdisciplinary field that applies computational techniques from computer and information science, operations research, applied mathematics and statistics to facilitate the integration of environmental, societal and economic needs and constraints for sustainable development.

Themes

This course has three main themes:

  1. Development of computational models and methods for decision-making to facilitate management and allocation of social, economic and environmental costs and benefits.
  2. Development of in-the-loop embedded computational modules for monitoring, management and control of ecological, technical and social systems.
  3. Study of the impact of the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICT) on sustainability.

The course is designed to be an introduction to computational sustainability, providing a broad coverage of the field. It is suitable for graduate students in computer science and computer engineering or graduate students in other disciplines with good familiarity with algorithms and computational methods.

Image source: (Poole & Mackworth, 2010)

Framework

Organization

Resources

We shall use and further develop this collection of Computational Sustainability resources.

Schedule, Topics and Readings

Here is the Class Schedule with the weekly topics and readings.

Grades

Student grades will be based on class participation (20%), project proposal (10%), project presentation (20%) and the final project paper (50%). There will be no exams in the course.


  Alan Mackworth 2014-02-09