05/12/2014
SoCS '14 Symposium on Computational Sustainability
Between November 26 and 28, national and international representatives from research and industry met to discuss topics about sustainability in IT. The SoCS 2014 Symposium on Computational Sustainability took place in Schloss Klingewalde in Görlitz (University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz). The event was organized by Prof. Lässig and his Enterprise Application Development Group (ead.hszg.de) in the context of the research project SustainableITServices.
The vision, formulated by Carla Gomez at Cornell University is, that computer scientists can — and should — play a key role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the way we manage and allocate our natural resources, while enriching and transforming Computer Science. SoCS '14 wants to build on this. This has in particular been also addressed in the two inspiring keynote speeches of the event, given by Prof. Michael Jischa (TU Clausthal) and Dr. Debal Deb (Center for Interdiciplinary Studies, India), (vgl. http://socs14.sita-research.org/program).
Computational Sustainability is an emerging area that aims to apply techniques and methods from computer science and related disciplines (e.g., information science, applied mathematics, operations research, and statistics) to help manage the growing need of sustainable processes and products in the globalized economy. The focus of Computational Sustainability is on developing computational and mathematical models, techniques, methods, and tools for a broad range of sustainability related applications: from decision making and policy analysis concerning the management and allocation of resources to the design of new sustainable techniques, practices and products.
During the three days of conference a lot of inspiring and interdisciplinary talks were given, all about several aspects of sustainability in the IT context. On the first day, academics and students from various research areas of computer science, mathematics, ecology and mechanics presented topics like Sustainability in Enterprise IT Solutions, Cloud Computing, Privacy and Machine Learning. During a guided tour through the city in Goerlitz and the succeeding "Get Together", the presented topics were discussed in personal conversations. On the second day, representatives of business and industry presented innovations and solutions about the sustainable use of resources. The last day of the event was dedicated to the PhD students in the groups of the professors Lässig and Gaedke (TU Chemnitz) at GIII (Görlitz, University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz) with talks about current research of the EAD-Group (ead.hszg.de, Prof. Lässig) and the VSR-Group (vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de, Prof. Gaedke).
The conference included the 4. SITA Meeting (sita-research.org), which took place for the first time in Görlitz. Next year it will be held in Berlin.
