Sustainability
Human economic and technological activities is beginning to impact the Earth’s ecosystems at an alarming rate, leading to global warming, climate instability, stress on natural ecosystems, pollution and many other negative effects. Since 2006, CSL has began to focus its attention very seriously on this important problem. Our goal is to develop the infrastructure for community memories which empower a community to manage their commons with tools such as participatory sensing, environmental modeling and prediction, social tagging, geographic localisation and visualisation.
Background: Our Vision
Members:
Luc Steels, François Pachet, Peter Hanappe
The Sony Computer Science Laboratory initiated a long-term collaboration with the Physics Department of Oxford University and the U.K. Met Office. The Oxford University Department of Atmospheric Physics is among the leading world centres in climate simulation. They are launching a new major scientific experiment, the Millennium Experiment, to reconstruct the climate of the past 1200 years using the U.K. Met Office’s climate model.
Sony CSL Paris’ research has led to an optimised version and a low-power version of the climate simulation. The first version speeds up the computation of the model, which reduces the total energy requirement. The second version runs the simulation in the background without requiring additional energy, thus allowing users to participate in the project with 50% less energy compared to earlier experiments.
More information about the project and on how you can participate can be found here.
Team: Peter Hanappe
Collaboration: U.K. Met Office (Olivier Boucher, Nicolas Bellouin), University of Oxford (Hiro Yamazaki, Tolu Aina), Anthony Beurive
Social tagging allows users to associate tags with information items, such as music files, texts, pictures, etc. At CSL we are investigating how social tagging can be used as a component of community memories to annotate aspects of the environment as experienced by people. Concrete projects are under way within the context of the Tagora EU Project.
Team: Nicolas Maisonneuve, Peter Hanappe
Additional funding: Tagora
A Mobile Sensing Network augments mobile devices, such as mobile phones, with sensing capabilities. Through the use of custom, generic sensor interfaces, we aim to turn these devices into mobile measurement stations for measuring aspects of the environment.
We are currently experimenting with sensors attached to mobile phones and software to localise, upload and aggregate the sensory data. Social tagging adds a layer of meaning to the quantitative information which is visualised through websites and on the mobile device itself.
Team: Nicolas Maisonneuve
Project: NoiseTube
The project will be presented at the Sony CSL Open House 2009Â on Oct. 9.
Better awareness of environmental issues requires better models and this implies high performance scientific computing. This project is investigating how we can harness the power of the CELL processor to significantly increase the scope and precision of environmental simulations, particularly those relevant for climate prediction.
Team: Peter Hanappe
Collaboration: Met Office UK (Olivier Boucher), Oxford University, Atmospheric Physics (Hiro Yamazaki), Anthony Beurive
