[UCI-Calit2] Seminar on 'Greening Through IT' June 30

[Stuart Ross]

Announcing the first presentation in this year's seminar series for the 

Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology
(SURF-IT)

 

Wednesday, June 30    Calit2 Building, Room 3008

 

A light lunch will be available at 11:45 AM; the seminar will begin at
12:00.

 

"Greening through IT"

Dr. William Tomlinson

 

Human minds are not well suited to thinking about problems that occur
over long periods of time, large distances, or vast levels of
complexity, but environmental problems often develop on these scales.
By helping bridge from human scales to environmental scales, information
technology (IT) can help our civilization launch appropriate responses
to these critical concerns.  Professor Tomlinson's remarks will use this
scale-based framework to discuss how IT systems can help address a broad
range of topics including education, information access, group action,
and the reconfiguration of infrastructures.  He will present examples of
both individual and institutional Green IT systems from around the world
and from his own research, such as smart energy meters, interactive
environmental education systems, and tools for community organizing,
among others.  In particular, he will describe KarunaTree, an NSF-funded
project to build a game using Google Earth that helps children learn
about and intervene in the distributed chains of causality that underlie
a lot of the environmental issues we're currently facing.  While there
are significant environmental concerns associated with IT itself -- such
as energy use, CO2 production and electronic waste -- IT is likely to
play a major role in a more sustainable future; understanding the
contexts in which it can be most effective is of critical importance.

 

Dr. Tomlinson is Associate Professor of Informatics at UCI and a
researcher in Calit2.  The MIT Press has published his work entitled
Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental
Sustainability.  He studies the fields of environmental informatics,
human-computer interaction, multi-agent systems and computer-supported
learning.  His SURF-IT Fellow in 2010 is Jason Lu, a computer science
major.  

SURF-IT is cosponsored by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities
Office.

 

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