36 AI MAGAZINE It might be thought that artificial intelligence techniques or other types of computational methods are irrelevant in countries with few technological resources. As just one example of the possibilities, however, take road traffic in cities. The chaotic and spectacular road congestion that is characteristic of developing-world cities is a microcosm of opportunities for applying A...

Consider the problem of protecting endangered species by selecting patches of land to be used for conservation purposes. Typically, the availability of patches changes over time, and recommendations must be made dynamically. This is a challenging prototypical example of a sequential optimization problem under uncertainty in computational sustainability. Existing techniques do not scale to probl...

SUMMER 2014 31 Ecological processes that occur at global scales are among the most impressive natural phenomena on Earth; they link environments across the globe and capture the imagination of observers. For example, billions of North American birds, representing more than 400 species, migrate annually, often thousands of miles, frequently under the cover of darkness, between breeding and nonbr...

This introductory chapter provides definitions of sustainability, sustainable development, decoupling, and related terms; gives an overview of existing interdisciplinary research fields related to ICT for Sustainability, including Environmental Informatics, Computational Sustainability, Sustainable HCI, and Green ICT; introduces a conceptual framework to structure the effects of ICT on sustaina...

The CP conference is the annual international conference on constraint programming. It is concerned with all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision-making, resource allocation, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The CP community is very keen to ensure it remains open to interdisciplin...

Many problems in computational sustainability involve constraints on connectivity. When designing a new wildlife corridor, we need it to be geographically connected. When planning the harvest of a forest, we need new areas to harvest to be connected to areas that have already been harvested so we can access them easily. And when town planning, we need to connect new homes to the existing utilit...

agricultural sustainability refers to the ability of a farm to produce food indefinitely, without causing irreversible damage to ecosystem health. the main objective of this study was to formulate a structural model to analyze the effects of ecological, social, and economic factors on sustainable agricultural development in qazvin province of iran. to achieve this aim, a structural model with 4...

Wildland fires (or wildfires) occur on all continents except for Antarctica. These fires threaten communities, change ecosystems, destroy vast quantities of natural resources and the cost estimates of the damage done annually is in the billions of dollars. Controlling wildland fires is resource-intensive and there are numerous examples where the resource demand has outstripped resource availabi...

agricultural sustainability refers to the ability of a cropping system to produce, without causing irreversible damage tothe ecosystem. there is an increasing need to view cropping systems and identify management practices in a holisticindicator-based impact assessment. the main objective of this study was to compare and rank the cropping systems of themarvdasht plain in fars province; in order...

the issue of sustainable development has been widely acknowledged and spread rapidly after united nations conference on environment and development in rio in 1992. considerable attention is given to urban settlement areas. thus, role of urban development is seen as a challenging issue under circumstances. outcomes of the current patterns of world population growth and industrial development are...