KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

R.Sadananda
Asian Institute of Technology
Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

The Agenda 21 declarations during the Earth Summit of 1992, followed by the recent declarations at Johannesburg make the movement of Sustainable Development a truly a global one. The Rio de Janeiro meet outlines various aspects of the Sustainability of our planet, with emphasis on the role of Information and Decision-making. Although the issue of sustainable development has been in discussion in various platforms for decades before, such declarations add additional dimensions and help mobilize resources - financial as well as ideological. A number of initiatives have followed especially at the international levels. A great deal of data is being collected and databases are pervading. Most of these pertain to the environment and natural resources.
Sustainability involves immediate and long-term perspective, as well as local and global perspectives at the same time. These perspectives tend to come in conflict due to diversity of the world in terms of geography, history, culture, language and great disparities in wealth distribution. It is our contention that physical Sustainability is closely linked to the Sustainability of the knowledge, which grows as a network of beliefs, thoughts and ideas of people of current generation, accumulated from the past and possibly the projections to the future. Therefore such a network is a live process, involving growth, negotiation and conflict resolutions. In a general and at a political level the Kyoto Convention and Protocol, and the like outline areas for possible negotiation and conflict resolution for a framework to face the challenges of climate change and possible underlying causes. An important issue is poverty and prosperity. It is an age-old issue, but now increasingly seen as an integral part of an understanding of sustainable development.
In this presentation let us look at the issue of sustainability from a computational point of view. We may not have an agreed formal definition of Sustainable Development. Decades ago formal models were developed such as club of Rome, which offered insights on the limits to growth, although one could say their successes were limited by a, among others, process of overselling. It may be seen as interaction between various agents involved each of them with a set of beliefs and goals to accomplish. Given the convergence of interests of peoples of the world towards a common objective of sustainable development to maintain and to foster the diversity of worldviews that form the ingredients of the richness of the world is a great challenge. In the absence of a grand unifying conceptual framework the knowledge network model should be able to bring out issues, which are not obvious and even likely to be counterintuitive.

Biography

R. Sadananda is a professor of Computer Science at the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand and has held academic positions in University of Texas, USA, Sophia University, Japan, Curtin University in Australia, Technical University in Hamburg and Universities in India where he graduated. His academic interests center on Artificial Intelligence, but his research areas span a wider spectrum. They include Self-Organization Schemes, Telemedicine, and Computing for Sustainable Development, and Strategies for Computer Science Education. Professor Sadananda has held senior academic administrative positions. He has served on the Board of the Asian Institute of Technology and in Academic Committees of other Institutes