Carbon Neutrality Should Not Be the End Goal: Lessons for Institutional Climate Action From U.S. Higher Education

Aggressive climate action pledges from governments, businesses and institutions have increasingly taken the form of commitments to net carbon neutrality. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are uniquely positioned to innovate in this area, and over 800 U.S. colleges and universities have pledged to achieve net carbon neutrality. Eleven leading U.S. HEIs have already attained this status. Here, we examine their approaches to achieving net carbon neutrality, highlighting risks associated with treating emissions reduction approaches such as carbon offsets, renewable energy certificates, and bioenergy as best practice in isolation from broader policy frameworks. While pursuing net carbon neutrality has led to important institutional shifts toward sustainability, the mix of approaches used by HEIs is out of alignment with a broader U.S. decarbonization roadmap; in aggregate, these carbon neutral schools underutilize electrification and new zero-carbon electricity. We conclude by envisioning how HEIs can refocus climate mitigation efforts towards decarbonization (with net carbon neutrality as a possible milestone), with an emphasis on actions that will help shift policy and markets at larger scales

The Design Of A Tool Kit For Case-Based Design Aids

. This paper extends the discussion of Case-Based Design Aids (CBDAs) presented at the 1992 AI in Design Conference (Domeshek and Kolodner, 1992). After reviewing the CBDA concept and its motivation, we discuss progress in implementing such systems, and focus on the generalization of our original CBDA (first developed to support architects with the conceptual design of buildings) into a tool kit applicable to a wide range of design domains. Experience in gathering and organizing case materials, and consideration of more use-scenarios have led us to reorganize and refine many aspects of the original proposal. Here we report our experience building CBDAs for architecture and for jet aircraft subsystem design using the CBDA tool kit Design-MUSE. 1. Case-Based Design Aids: Background and Review At the 1992 AI & Design Conference we presented a paper describing early work on a case-based design aid for architecture (CBDA) (Domeshek and Kolodner, 1992). That paper focused on two ideas: the..

THE MULTIPURPOSE PRESENTATION SYSTEM"

This paper describes a knowledge-based user-oriented interface system which is unique in its combined use of data base, graphics, and AI tech-nologies. All of the data presented to the user, as well as all of the data input by the user, is maintained and used as abstract “objects ” using an AI object-oriented knowledge representation approach. However, the system employs a rela-tional data base as both the storage media for all of the object information, and as the inter-face between the application and interface sys-tems. The object-oriented approach allows both the application system and the user interface to operate upon the data, describe image layouts, manipulate viewing windows, and build display images using high-level commands. The use of the relational data base provides a ccmmon interface between many types of application systems and the user interface, and helps to maintain a clean separation between the functions of the applica-tion system and the user interactions. 1

Case-Based Reasoning - Survey and Future Directions

This paper surveys the field of case-based reasoning (CBR) -- both in science and in industrial applications. It starts with a short introduction to the essential ideas and concepts CBR is built upon. Then follows a bit of history that is interesting for understanding the development and the current state of the field. Its main part introduces and reviews the most important sub-fields of CBR: theoretical foundations, CBR for document retrieval, product selection, help-desk support, diagnosis, configuration, planning, and design. In the last part, we discuss why the field has developed rather well and will have a promising future, particularly in new areas like self-service and e-commerce applications in the world wide web

Dynamic Idea Maps: A Framework for Linking Ideas with Cases during Brainstorming

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