Vision

People around the world are becoming aware of sustainability related issues including energy savings and environmental protection. Computing plays a critical role in our society, thus has a special responsibility for social development and welfare of human beings, for this generation and the future generation.

Despite the continuous efforts in the computing community, today's undergraduate computing education often looks similar to what it was decades ago, and fails to address our social and environmental responsibility.

Our vision is to revitalize undergraduate computing education by understanding, advocating, integrating, and assessing the study of sustainability in computing education; by doing so, we will better prepare our graduates with computing competencies, multi-disciplinary knowledge, and computational thinking to create a sustainable future.

What is sustainability?

Sustainability has received tremendous interest in the past few decades across the world. Sustainability is often defined as "meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". The term is often used in reference to the potential longevity of vital environmental and human ecological systems, such as climate, agriculture, forestry, civil, and human communities in general.

The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of Information Technology (IT) have thrown the spotlight on the environmental and social impact of computing systems and IT infrastructure. For example, the power consumption of data centers in the U.S. doubled between 2000 and 2005, and will likely triple again in the next few years. In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed bills to raise the IT industry's role in energy and environmental policy to the national level.

Sustainable computing, or green computing, is the study and practice of supporting business critical computing needs by using computing resources in a more efficient and eco-friendly manner. It is a holistic approach that stretches from power to waste to application to education. Sustainable computing represents a dramatic change in the priority of IT industry from the traditional economic cost/benefit model to the new sustainable model by mutually advancing economic, environmental, and social goals.

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