Morning discussion for the WSRCC

This morning Jorge and I attempted to attend the Workshop on Software Research on Climate Change via a skype phone call.   But Skype wasn't cooperating.  So, we had our a own mini-workshop ourselves.  The purpose of the workshop is to respond to the challenge, "how can we apply our research strengths to make significant contributions to the problems of mitigation and adaptation of climate change?"  But we interpreted the question as, "What can software researchers do to make significant contributions.... ?"  As a result, we considered some alternatives that are probably out of scope for the workshop.

• Drop out of research.  We recognise climate change is an urgent problem and that many scientific research projects have very indirect, uncertain, and long-term payoffs. For the most part, the problem of climate change is fairly well analysed and many solutions are known, but in need of political organisation in order to carry them out. Perhaps really what is needed is for more people to "roll up their sleeves" and join a movement or organisation that's fighting towards this. 
• Engage in action research/participatory research. If you decide to stay in research then we propose that you ground your studies by working on problems that you can be sure real stakeholders have.  In particular, we suggest that you start with a stakeholder that is directly involved in solving the problem (e.g. activists, scientists, journalists, politicians) and that you work with throughout your study.  At the most basic level, they act as a reality-check for your ideas, but we think that the best way to make this relationship work is through action research: joining their organisation to solve their problems, becoming directly involved in the solutions yourself.  Finding publishable results is an added bonus which is secondary to the pressing need.  
• Elicit the requirements of real world stakeholders.  As you can see from the last point, we're concerned that as software researchers we lack a good understanding of the problems holding us (society) back from dealing with climate change effectively.  So, we suggest a specific research project that surveys all the actors to figure out their needs and the place the software research can contribute.  This project would involve interviewing activists, scientists, journalists, politicians, and citizens to build a research roadmap. 
• Green metrics: dealing with accountability in a carbon market.  This idea is more vague, but simply a pointer to an area where we think software research may have some applicability. Assuming there is a compliance requirement for greenhouse gas pollution (e.g. a cap and trade system), then we will need to be able to accurately measure carbon emissions on all levels: from industry to homes.  
• Software for emergencies.  Like the last point, this is one rather vague.  The idea is this: in doomsday future scenarios of climate change, the world is not a peaceful place.  Potentially more decision-making is done by people in emergency situations.  This context shift might change the rules for interface design: where say, in peacetime, a user might be unwilling to double-click on a link, or might be willing to spend time browsing menus, but in a disaster scenario their preferences may change.   So, how exactly does a user's preferences change in an emergency, and how might we design software to adjust to them? 
• Make video-conferencing actually easy.  This was our experience all through the day:If we ever want to maintain our personal connections without traveling we need to solve this problem.  You'd think that we had already solved it, as we have the basic technology already in place.  We have Skype, it is just too flakey for relying on for important gatherings.  Or, maybe, hotels and conference centres can't deal with the bandwidth demands.  Or, maybe conference organisers don't make remote attendance a priority. 
  
  Even getting us through the basic technological obstacles may not be enough for a rich conference participation.  Simply having a video and audio feed doesn't compare to face-to-face conversations.  Maybe it never will, but certainly we can do better?

Position papers from the 1st Intl. Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change

Tomorrow the First International Workshop on Software Research and Climate Change is being held as part of the Onward! 2009 conference in Florida. Jorge and I are going to attempt to attend the workshop remotely, so wish us luck. I'll be blogging about the experience tomorrow.

To begin, and as a refresher, I thought I'd post a single sentence summary of each of the position papers submitted for this workshop. Position papers were solicited from participants and were to respond to the challenge stated on the opening page of the workshop. In summary, the challenge is: how do we apply our expertise in software research to save our butts from certain destruction due to climate collapse. Or, as Steve puts it, "how can we apply our research strengths to make significant contributions to the problems of mitigation and adaptation of climate change."

In answer to that challenge, the position papers suggest software research should...

"Data Centres vs. Community Clouds", Gerard Briscoe and Ruzanna Chitchya

... tackle the energy inefficiency of cloud computing by investigating decentralised models where consumer machines also become providers and coordinators of computing resources.

"Optimizing Energy Consumption in Software Intensive systems", Arjan de Roo, Hasan Sozer and Mehmet Aksit

... provide the tools and design patterns for building software systems that meet both their energy-consumption requirements and their functional design requirements.

"Modeling for Intermodal Freight Transportation Policy Analysis", J. Scott Hawker

... improve three aspects of decision-making tools (like, say, an intermodal freight transportation policy analysis model): make them easier to use and interact with (HCI-wise); deal with the complexity of the models and the troubles with integrating various existing implementations; as well as (my favourite), make sure the software is built well since most of the folks doing the building are not trained.

"Computing Education with a Cause", Lisa Jamba

... investigate how to involve computer science students in research "toward improving health outcomes related to climate change" as part of the university curriculum.

"Some Thoughts on Climate Change and Software Engineering Research", Lin Liu, He Zhang, and Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

... investigate how to navigate and integrate knowledge from many different disciplines and perspectives so as to help people communicate and work together; build decision-support, analysis and educational tools for people, companies, and government; build tools for incorporating environmental non-functional requirements into software construction.

"Refactoring Infrastructure: Reducing emissions and energy one step at a time", Chris Parnin and Carsten Görg.

... use insights from software refactoring to develop refactoring techniques for physical infrastructure (energy grid, water supply, etc.).

"In search for green metrics", Juha Taina and Pietu Pohjalainen

... establish a "framework for estimating or measuring the effects of a software systems' effect on climate change."

"Enabling Climate Scientists to Access Observational Data", David Woollard, Chris Mattmann, Amy Braverman, Rob Raskin, and Dan Crichton

... build systems to help climate scientists locate, transfer, and transform observational data from disparate sources.

"Context-aware Resource Sharing for People-centric Sensing", Jorge Vallejos, Matthias Stevens, Ellie D’Hondt, Nicolas Maisonneuve, Wolfgang De Meuter, Theo D’Hondt, and Luc Steels.

... investigate how to use our everyday hand-held devices as sensors to provide fine-grained environmental data.

"Language and Library Support for Climate Data Applications", Eric Van Wyk, Vipin Kumar, Michael Steinbach, Shyam Boriah, and Alok Choudhary

... build language extensions and libraries to make climate data analysis easier and more computationally efficient.

Modeling the solutions to climate change

For the past couple of weeks a few of us in the software engineering group have been meeting to take up Steve's modeling challenge: we are attempting to model (visually, not computationally) the proposed solutions from several popular books. The idea is to do so so that it's possible (easy?) to compare the differences and similarities between them. Here is the homepage* for the project, which roughly tracks what we're up to. I'm going to summarise our progress so far.

To start off, we narrowed our focus down to just comparing the books by their take on wind power solutions. We began with David McKay's excellent book, Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air.

In our first few meeting we decided to just "shoot first and ask questions later". That is to say, we just collaborative built up a model of the chapters on wind power as we saw fit in the moment, without following any visual syntax and without worrying too much about what to include or what to ignore. The result looked like this:

At the bottom of that picture is our brainstorming about what other aspects to include (the left hand column), the types of perspectives/analysis that McKay uses and that may be useful to include a future exercise (middle column), and the types of differences we expect to see when comparing models (right column).

The next step would have been to come up with the same sort of model for another book, and then start to figure out how best to make the models comparable so that it is visually easy to see the differences and similarities between the various models.

We didn't do that. Instead, we decided to try making a more principled model. Actually, set of models. We decided to construct an entity-relationship (ER) model, and a goal model (i*) for two books and then see about how to go about making those models comparable.

We began with the entity-relationship model. Again, for McKay's book. McKay's book is fairly well segmented into chapters that have back-of-the-envelope-style analysis and others that have a more broad discussion of the actors and issues. In our first attempt shown above, we mainly only modeled the two chapters on wind-power analysis. But if we just stuck to those chapters for the ER and goal models we'd be left with very impoverished models that miss all of the important contextual bits that frame the wind-power discussion. We relaxed the restriction on our wind-power focus slightly so as to include parts of the book that discuss the context. In the case of McKay's book, chapter one covers this nicely.

After our first few meetings we've completed the ER domain model, as well as made a good start on the goal model.

For the wider context (chapter one), we built the following ER model:

This model is a bit of a monster, but I'm told that most models are like that. Other than the standard UML relationship syntax, we have coloured the nodes to represent whether the concept comes from the book directly (blue), or whether we included it because we felt it was implied or simply helpful for clarity (yellow).

Using the same process we created the following ER model for just the two chapters on wind:

As well, we've begun to go back over the first chapter and build up an i* goal model. Here it is so far:

Stay tuned for further updates on what we're up to. I'd suggest that at the moment these models should simply be taken as our first hack. We haven't done any work whatsoever to make them very readable or comparable, for instance.

* I feel like "homepage" is a rather outdated word now. Is that so?

Geoscientific Model Development

I had an wonderful chat last week with Stephen Griffies from GFDL. It was a fascinating interview that I'll have to blog about over several posts because we just covered so much territory.

One especially interesting pointer Stephen gave me was to a new journal from European Geosciences Union titled Geoscientific Model Development. This is a journal that accepts articles about the nuts and bolts of building modelling software. It is apparently the only journal like it. Most of the other journals that climate scientists publish in will only accept papers on the "science" derived from the use of such models.

For those of us interested in how climate models are developed, this journal will likely be very relevant. What I find particular cool is the transparent peer-review process and open-discussion. This means for a particular article (say, this one on coupling software for earth-system modelling), you can read the paper and the current referee reviews (with the option to submit your own comments).

One issue with the journal Stephen mentioned is that it is currently not listed in any of the major scientific citation indices. Effectively this means that scientists do not get workplace "cred" for publishing in this journal. Thus, there is little motivation to publish even though, as Stephen put it, having a peer-reviewed publication to "rationalise" code and design decisions is essential to ensuring the scientific integrity of the models.