Call for Abstracts: Due end of Monday, April 15th, 11:59 pm Pacific Daylight Savings Time.
Submit online
Selection criteria
The Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) Conference brings together a range of academics, practitioners, and policy-makers from a variety of fields engaged in energy and climate efforts to provide the latest and most relevant behavioral research, best practices, and methodologies.
New from the GAO: Energy efficiency, wind energy
March 31, 2013
Energy Efficiency: Better Coordination among Federal Programs Needed to Allocate Testing Resources. GAO-13-135, March 28.
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-135
Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/653429.pdf
Wind Energy: Additional Actions Could Help Ensure Effective Use of Federal Financial Support. GAO-13-136, March 11.
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-136
Highlights - http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/652958.pdf
Manufactured Homes: State-Based Replacement Programs May Provide Benefits, but Energy Savings Do Not Fully Offset Costs. GAO-13-373, March 28.
http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-373
Highlights -
An Energy Literate Citizenry from K-to-Gray: A Webcast on the Department of Energy’s Energy Literacy Initiative
January 31, 2013
Wednesday, February 6, 2013 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM EST
Register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/198384864
This webinar will detail the Energy Literacy Framework, which identifies concepts every citizen should know to be energy literate. With this document, Department of Energy (DOE) aims to empower energy educators to apply an interdisciplinary, systems-based approach to teaching the physical, natural and social sciences necessary for a comprehensive understanding of energy.
2013 Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop
Telluride, Colorado, June 30 -July 20, 2013
We are now accepting proposals for Topic Areas in the 2013 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop. We support topics and projects in neuromorphic cognition, particularly those that involve solving challenging ‘everyday’ tasks that incorporate domain-specific knowledge, exploration, prediction, and problem solving. In particular, we are interested in projects that hold promise for addressing Grand Challenge types of problems that do not have strong solutions of any form, neuromorphic or not. These Challenge problems should feature long-duration sensorimotor problems that involve autonomous cognitive decision making. Examples might include tasks such as learning a new language, navigating through an unknown environment to locate an object or reach a desired location, adaptively manipulating unknown or complex objects in the service of a task, playing a game requiring inference of hidden information or long-term planning and learning, etc. Proposals related to hardware technologies that aim to bring these capabilities to reality are also encouraged. Topic proposals that aim to solve a particular problem using the multidisciplinary experience of participants will be favored over topics that simply gather a large number of people working within a discipline, or using a single technology, or approach.
Topic areas for this summer’s Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop will be chosen from proposals submitted to the organizers.
Important: Due to the nature of our NSF grant (primary funding source), two topic areas are already established: “Interpreting actions of manipulation” and “Human-robot cooperation in the identification of speakers and exploration of space”. We will also have a “Future hardware technologies” tutorial/projects group.
Topic areas can span a large field; we are looking for leadership in planning activities and inviting good people in a field. Although past topic areas have tended to be very broad and discipline-oriented (e.g., cognition, audition, vision, robotics, neural interfacing, neuromorphic VLSI, etc.), application-oriented topic areas (e.g., sensor fusion, game-playing robot, object recognition, sound localization, human robot interaction, etc.) are especially desirable.
Topic area leaders will receive housing for themselves and their invitees, and limited travel funds. Topic area leaders will help to define the field of neuromorphic cognition engineering through the projects they pursue and the people they invite. They shape their topic by inviting speakers and project leaders (the invitees) and by initiating topic area project discussions prior to the workshop.
Teams of two organizers are required. One of the organizers should be an attendee of a previous Telluride Workshop (in any capacity) and has stayed at the Workshop for at least one week.
Pre-workshop topic area choices and study assignments.
Before the workshop begins, each topic area will be required to prepare and distribute study materials that constitute: 1) an introductory presentation (e.g., pptx, video, review paper) of the fundamental knowledge associated with the topic area that everyone at the workshop should be exposed to, and 2) a few critical papers that the participants in the topic area should read before the workshop. The topic area should 3) begin a serious group discussion of the projects (e.g., via Facebook, Skype, email, etc).
The maximum 2-page proposals should include:
1. Title of topic area.
2. Names of the two topic leaders, their affiliations, and contact information (email
addresses!).
3. A paragraph explaining the focus and goals of the topic area.
4. A list of possible specific topic area projects.
5. A list of example invitees (up to six names and institutions). No commitments necessary.
6. Any other material that fits within the two-page limit that will help us make a smart
choice.
Send your topic area proposal in pdf or text format to organizers13@neuromorphs.net with subject line containing “topic area proposal”.
Proposals must be received by January 16, 2013; proposals received after the deadline may still be considered if space is available.
Resources limit the workshop to roughly 2 additional topic areas, each with 5 invitees. If your proposal for the topic area is not accepted, we will work with you to see if there is a natural way to include your ideas (and you) into the accepted topic areas. We hope to have significant turn-over each year in the topic areas and leaders to ensure fresh new ideas and participants.
See the Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering (www.ine-web.org) for background information on the workshop and neuromorphs.net for past workshop wikis.
We look forward to your topic proposals!
Deadline: January 16, 2013
The Workshop Directors:Cornelia Fermüller (University of Maryland), Ralph Etienne-Cummings (Johns Hopkins Univ.) Shih-Chii Liu (University of Zurich and ETH Zurich), Timmer Horiuchi (University of Maryland)
Last call at the Mother Earth cafe
July 31, 2012
Recently I was reading an op ed piece in the NY Times ” The Conversions of a Climate-Change Skeptic” by Richard A. Muller, the famously Koch brothers affiliated climate scientist. Muller has now agreed with the findings of the I.P.C.C. that the increased carbon dioxide emissions caused by the movement into modernity of vast areas of the world previously under industrialized. This will go down in history as the year that the number of climate/energy/ food related issues in the world began to make people think about just how much trouble we might all be in.
His opinion piece links to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project and some really impressive but depressing data. The really well documented finding point to a rate of change that will be very hard to overcome, especially in a world where getting any two people to agree on any course of action seems very hard indeed.
Since I work a lot in the area of ” Sustainability Consulting” and ” Energy Conservation” I guess I feel like this discussion has all the quality of a late night bar conversation. Everyone involved knows that nothing is going to change, that all the excited and interesting arguments are just an excuse to do nothing until the booze soaks in and the lights go out. May as well enjoy the party right?
There are so many interesting and creative solutions to the problems of climate change and even global economic prosperity. Every day I hear about people who are just doing good work, developing better ways to live on a beautiful but finite world. What will it take to change the dialog to a more enlightened, lets do the best we can, view?
A year with less
January 1, 2012
2011 was the year of living with less for us. Economic and social circumstances gave us a chance to see how much of the “stuff” we had around us we could get by without, not because we wanted to but just because we had no “home” for books and furniture and a limit to what we could carry.
“Never own more than you can carry in two hands at a dead run” a wise carpenter once told me. After finding we couldn’t continue to live in beautiful Laguna Beach California without significant income, we opted for life on the road. ( I guess, in truth, I did, my wife just agreed )
We sold our two cars, bikes, guitars and misc. objects. Gave a lot to Goodwill and others, especially clothing. Packed two small bags in a new Honda Element ( no payments for two months ) and headed out.
Today, January 1, 2012, we have a place to live, a new job, and this morning in a few hours some of our old things will arrive from California on a moving truck. It’s been an interesting lesson in what you need to get by. We didn’t ever “drop out” and have maintained the façade of normal existence the whole time. Staying in touch is just a matter of keeping the cell phone on, posting occasionally to facebook and twitter. I did job interviews and even skype calls from motels, gave a presentation in California, travelled to Washington and Boston, all from my car.
I lived without “health care” which I suppose could get dicey, but it really just meant being careful. ( I haven’t been sick, come to think of it )
So, hello 2012, time to start collecting things again. Looking forward to seeing some art we still own and eventually getting a new bicycle. The first thing we bought when we got a new apartment was a bed. Very comfortable.
It’s surprising how few things a person really needs.
In response to comments on a recent Economist article, and some ideas from Autodesks Phil Bernstein, I started thinking about how craft and life experience begin to add value to the whole idea of work. Rather than wait until I have perfected this post I want to start the dialog…
One reason I am so excited about this is how many great ideas I have encountered in the rapidly expanding high-performance engineering world as I travel the US talking with different companies evolving their business model during the great recession.
Some of the comments miss the point of where artisanal
innovation and lifelong learning can take the market. Don’t take Larry Katz
concept of a cabinetmaker so literally, but think instead of the IPhone’s level
of quality and function. A product designed to respect the importance of craft
and tactile interaction with the people who use the device. In the field of Architecture practitioners
are taking digital tools and asking “ how can we use these to transform the
materials we have worked with ?”
This level of co-operative discourse requires just the kind
of broad experiential education and understanding of product life cycle that
the author is describing. Think about the greening of Wal-Mart, is that a small
local economic engine? Hardly, and yet
as river guides and local food producers reinvent the corporate approach to
global economics new occupations and ways to understand the benefits of thinking artisianaly are emerging.
Health care and quality of life will improve when we
disconnect our economic model from the idea of humans as extensions of machines
and turn the equation around. Product
lines and exchange systems designed to value long term quality and deep ecology
manufacturing process actually create more value. You can’t develop that awareness without
getting out into the world and developing an understanding of how what you do
as an individual effects whole systems.
Watch as the next generation takes advantage of what they
learned during the recession to develop brilliant new tools and product lines
that “ do no harm” and still create wealth and stability.
