This project involves a workshop called "Workshop on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability" (WICS)to be held on June 27, 2011 in Salt-Lake City, Utah along with the annual SECON conference. The workshop is expected to identify new areas where researchers working in communications technologies for sustainability and thereby open up new areas of research.
Workshop Theme One of the grand challenges of the twenty-first century is to foster a transition toward global sustainability, including water, air, land, food, and energy. Information and communication technology (ICT) has the great potential in facilitating the society’s efforts to foster the transition. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who have a broad vision and active interest in blazing the path forward on how computer science and engineering (CSE) research community can contribute in a significant way towards tackling challenging sustainability problems of our time. In particular, we have the following objectives: Identify areas how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can facilitate sustainability in general; Identify unique challenges and fundamental research issues in using ICT for sustainability; Bring to the attention of the networking community the importance and challenges for using ICT for sustainability. The workshop started with a one-day meeting, consisted of three research overview sessions, two breakout discussion sessions, and a summary session. In addition, because the workshop was held in conjunction with the 8th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON), we extended the meeting to the conference though a whole-conference panel. Intellectual Merit This workshop addresses sustainability, the most pressing issue in both the United States and across the world in the twenty-first century. ICT has the great potential to facilitate sustainability effort in general. The intellectual merit of the workshop is to identify unique challenges and fundamental research issues in using ICT for sustainability. Broader Impacts The workshop involved a broad and diverse set of participants and the workshop findings are distributed to the public for comments and engagement. Furthermore, through the all-conference panel at IEEE SECON, we reported the findings of the workshop. This workshop encourages and broadens the participation of the networking community on sustainability issues. Outcomes An immediate outcome of the meeting is a report that was submitted to NSF. We expect that this will lead to significant research attention in the area of using ICT for sustainability. In addition, we reported the findings of the workshop at the all-conference panel at SECON, which further brought to the attention of the networking community. The report and the details of the workshop can be found at www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~liu/WICS/WICS.htm .
