[open-sustainability] Artificial intelligence challenges for sustainability?

[Jack Townsend]

Hi everyone

Had some interesting discussions with researchers recently about the potential to apply artificial intelligence to addressing sustainability challenges. Do you have any suggestions for sustainability problems that might particularly benefit from the application of artificial intelligence? 

Specifically these two approaches:
Reinforcement learning
Deep learning
Technically this involves: 
Big goal that sits above the whole system
Long term reward that can use to tune how the system learns to achieve some goal
Higher dimensional  (very many different variables, such as pixels on a computer screen)
Temporal  (happening over time)
Can involve behavioural data, so has the potential for artificial intelligence to lead behaviour change.
Are there any problems that you're facing in your work that might benefit from these approaches, or people you know? There is the potential for this to lead to some relevant research.

Alternatively, could approach this question from the data angle and ask, what are some of the richest sustainability datasets available?  

Jack

Web, Open Data & Sustainability		University of Southampton

@JackTownsend_ 					jack at jacktownsend.net


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-sustainability/attachments/20140702/fe7644a5/attachment.html>