Programming for the Planet (PROPL)PROPL 2024

There are simultaneous crises across the planet due to rising CO₂ emissions, rapid biodiversity loss, and desertification. Assessing progress on these complex and interlocking issues requires a global view on the effectiveness of our adaptations and mitigations. To succeed in the coming decades, we need a wealth of new data about our natural environment that we rapidly process into accurate indicators, with sufficient trust in the resulting insights to make decisions that affect the lives of billions of people worldwide.

However, programming the computer systems required to effectively ingest, clean, collate, process, explore, archive, and derive policy decisions from the planetary data we are collecting is difficult and leads to artefacts presently not usable by non-CS-experts, not reliable enough for scientific and political decision making, and not widely and openly available to all interested parties. Concurrently, domains where computational techniques are already central (e.g., climate modelling) are facing diminishing returns from current hardware trends and software techniques.

PROPL explores how to close the gap between state-of-the-art programming methods being developed in academia and the use of programming in climate analysis, modelling, forecasting, policy, and diplomacy. The aim is to build bridges to the current practices used in the scientific community.

The first edition of this workshop will comprise:

• half day of invited talks
• half day of contributed talks (selected by the programme committee based on short abstracts)
• half day of ‘working workshop brainstorming’’ format.

Call for Papers

We solicit proposals for talks on topics relevant to the workshop, particularly those with a multidisciplinary flavour consider how research in programming languages and systems can be leveraged to address the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.