News @ UOW
Opinions & Experts
Multimedia
Campus News & Events
Resources
 |
UOW and external Australian and overseas participants at the Carbon-C... |
Role of computing in climate change debate
The role of computing in the climate change debate was the focus of the Carbon-Centric Computing National Research Summit held at the University of Wollongong today (November 24).
The Carbon-Centric Computing Initiative was launched at the University of Wollongong in September this year with the release of a report authored by three University of Wollongong academics -- Professor Aditya Ghose (Director, Decision Systems Lab, School of Computer Science and Software Engineering), Associate Professor Helen Hasan (Director of the Activity Theory Usability Laboratory, School of Economics) and Professor Trevor Spedding (Head, School of Management and Marketing).
The report argued that computing technology can fundamentally alter the climate change debate.
The authors pointed out that IT-enabled smart logistics, smart energy use, smart utilities and ubiquitous optimisation can support a global online collaboration infrastructure that ensures minimisation of the global carbon footprint. And they said this could be done without hurting the business bottom line.
These themes were explored in detail at today’s research summit which brought together participants from the US, Canada and Australia. They included leading researchers from Cornell University (US), Simon Fraser University (Canada), Actenum Corporation (Canada), BlueScope Steel, CSIRO, the University of New South Wales, the Australian National University and Queensland University of Technology.
Topics discussed included large-scale collaborative optimisation, green business process management, distributed energy management and the role of computational intelligence in the climate change debate.
The meeting was opened by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Judy Raper. The Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research), Professor Lee Astheimer, also spoke on how the University planned to advance this important agenda.
A major industry-academia consortium is also being put together that aims to engage in a focused program of research to integrate a range of “carbon-centric” computing technologies and bring these to market-ready state and proactive advocacy with government at various levels to ensure explicit support (potentially through new schemes) for the deployment of efficiency enhancing IT tools.
It will be undertaken at the same time while educating industry (and other potential user communities) on the available repertoire of efficiency-enhancing information technologies.