This page lists the position papers submitted to the workshop. As there is no formal proceedings for the workshop, all of these papers should be treated as drafts - we encourage discussion and revision of these prior to (and during!) the workshop. To provide a forum for such discussion, we'll be using the google group "SE for the planet". Feel free to sign up and join the discussion.

• Gerard Briscoe and Ruzanna Chitchya, "Data Centres vs. Community Clouds".
• Arjan de Roo, Hasan Sozer and Mehmet Aksit, "Optimizing Energy Consumption in Software Intensive systems"
• J. Scott Hawker "Modeling for Intermodal Freight Transportation Policy Analysis".
• Lisa Jamba, "Computing Education with a Cause".
• Lin Liu, He Zhang, and Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed, "Some Thoughts on Climate Change and Software Engineering Research".
• Chris Parnin and Carsten Görg, "Refactoring Infrastructure: Reducing emissions and energy one step at a time".
• Juha Taina and Pietu Pohjalainen, "In search for green metrics".
• David Woollard, Chris Mattmann, Amy Braverman, Rob Raskin, and Dan Crichton, "Enabling Climate Scientists to Access Observational Data".
• Jorge Vallejos, Matthias Stevens, Ellie D’Hondt, Nicolas Maisonneuve, Wolfgang De Meuter, Theo D’Hondt, and Luc Steels, "Context-aware Resource Sharing for People-centric Sensing".
• Eric Van Wyk, Vipin Kumar, Michael Steinbach, Shyam Boriah, and Alok Choudhary, "Language and Library Support for Climate Data Applications".

The climate change problem can be seen as less a problem in physics than in information theory.

The classical problem in information theory, also known in its early days as "cybernetics", is decision making under uncertainty. The mathematics of the field were worked out as a foundation of digital machine design, as the propagation of a bit of information from one device to another necessarily requires an automated decision about the polarity of that bit. The founders of cybernetics became famous for suggesting that their approach could be extended to a vast array of problems, and indeed attempts have been made in a wide variety of applications to apply rigorous cybernetic theory. However, despite the aspirations of the field's founders, the ideas have not penetrated into governance.

The climate problem is the first and probably not the last problem where new criteria for management of highly complex systems intrudes upon evolved social mechanisms. For civilization to emerge from this problem relatively intact will require the world to collectively develop new skills. Whole system thinking, an idea much praised in the mid 20th century, cannot be seen as a fading intellectual fashion. We need cross-disciplinary rigor of new sorts.

In this talk, Michael Tobis, a geophysicist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics in Austin, and a long time devotee of both computer science and of information theory, will outline the climate policy problem from a whole systems point of view, emphasizing some points where the information sciences may have a considerable role in untangling the quandary.