I have conducted data-driven research on the Earth’s historical climate changes and the impact on current climate change from global energy production and greener cyberinfrastructure systems. I formed teams to develop Cyberinfrastructure to create diverse Community Environmental Observing Systems, including for observing the ocean floor, coral reefs, terrestrial ecosystems, marine microbial ecology metagenomics, and wildfire detection and dynamical prediction.
Focus areas
Climate Change
Data-driven research on the Earth's historical climate and the impact of energy production on modern climate change.
34 items
Environmental Observing Systems
WIFIRE, ocean-floor and coral-reef observing platforms, and Community Environmental Observing Systems.
30 items
The CENIC AI Resource Powers Diverse Disciplines
CENIC 2026: The Right Connection, Monterey, California. The archive date follows the official conference program; the source title slide retains its original year typo.
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presentationInternet & Climate Change: Cyberinfrastructure for a Carbon-Constrained World
Invited Talk at Salk Institute Retreat Scripps Seaside Forum, UC San Diego October 30, 2019
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presentationThe Transformational Nature of NSF Long-Term Funding on Santa Ana Wildfires in Southern California
Invited Presentation with Ilkay Altintas To the Council on Competitiveness SDSC, UC San Diego March 8, 2019
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presentationHow Studying Astrophysics and Coral Reefs Enabled Me to Become an Empowered, Engaged Patient
Invited Talk FutureMed at the Hotel Del Coronado, CA
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Sustainable Computing and Telecom Can Contribute to Limiting Global Climatic Disruption
Invited Seminar AT&T Shannon Labs Florham Park, NJ
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The Coupled Climate-Energy System: Limiting Global Climatic Disruption by Revolutionary Change in the Global Energy System
Invited Seminar National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Boulder, CO
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The Disruptive Transition to Intelligent, Secure, Low Carbon, and Climate Adaptive Infrastructure
Smart Infrastructure Panel Talk American Australian Leadership Dialogue New York City, NY
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The Role of University Energy Efficient Cyberinfrastructure in Slowing Climate Change
Talk to MGT166 Class Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility Otterson Hall, Rady School of Management, UCSD La Jolla, CA
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The Growing Interdependence of the Internet and Climate Change
Distinguished Lecture Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT
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The Energy Efficient Cyberinfrastructure in Slowing Climate Change
Invited Speaker Community Alliance for Distributed Energy Resources Scripps Forum, UCSD La Jolla, CA
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The Role of University Energy Efficient Cyberinfrastructure in Slowing Climate Change
Energy Leadership Lecture The Institute for Energy Efficiency University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA
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A Brief History of Earth’s Climate Change
Invited Talk Youth Leadership Dialogue Australian American Leadership Dialogue Stanford University Palo Alto, CA
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Cyberinfrastructure in a Carbon-Constrained World
09.11.05 Invited Talk EDUCAUSE 2009 Title: Cyberinfrastructure in a Carbon-Constrained World Denver, CO
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The Growing Interdependence of the Internet and Climate Change
Invited Talk MITRE Innovation Speaker Series McLean, VA
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The Growing Interdependence of the Internet and Climate Change
Invited Talk Negotiating the Downturn: Emerging Stronger Australian Industry Group National Forum Parliament House Canberra, Australia
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Green Cyberinfrastructure on a Carbon-Constrained Planet
Invited Talk Institute for the Future Board Meeting Palo Alto, CA
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Project GreenLight: Optimizing Cyberinfrastructure for a Carbon Constrained World
Keynote Talk for the Joint 33rd IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference COMPSAC 2009 and the 9th Annual International Symposium on Applications and the Internet SAINT 2009 Seattle, WA
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Can a Greener Internet Help Us Moderate Climate Change?
High Definition Remote Presentation to the Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad (MURPA) Program, located at Monash University, Australia La Jolla, CA
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Sustainability Requires Green Cyberinfrastructure
Invited Talk UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering Council of Advisors Sustainability Requires Green Cyberinfrastructure La Jolla, CA
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Can a Greener Internet Help Us Moderate Climate Change?
Calit2 / Institute for the Future Strategic Planning Retreat on Green IT La Jolla, CA
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Can a Greener Internet Help Us Moderate Climate Change?
Invited Talk Computational Research in Boston Seminar Series MIT Boston, MA
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Digital Infrastructure in a Carbon-Constrained World
Invited Talk SciPM 2009 Workshop on the Science of Power Management Arlington, VA
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Creating a Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (a.k.a. CAMERA)
Invited Talk Honoring David Kingsbury Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Palo Alto, CA
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Project GreenLight Measuring the Energy Cost of Applications, Algorithms, and Architectures
CENIC Awards Presentation Long Beach, CA
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Digital Infrastructure in a Carbon-Constrained World
Invited Presentation to the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) National Academy of Sciences Irvine, CA
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Restructuring Campus CI — UCSD-A LambdaCampus Research CI and the Quest for Zero Carbon ICT
Invited Presentation to the Net@EDU Campus Cyberinfrastructure Working Group Tempe, AZ
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Digital Infrastructure in a Carbon Constrained World – AALD Lecture – Stanford University
Invited Presentation to the West Coast Leadership Dialogue Stanford University Palo Alto, CA
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Calit2 – CSE’s Living Laboratory for Applications
UCSD CSE 91 – Perspectives in Computer Science (Spring 2008) Calit2@UCSD La Jolla, CA
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The FiRe CTO Design Challenge: Wildfire Technology
CTO Challenge Team presentation FiRe Conference San Diego, CA
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Toward a Global Coral Reef Observatory
Kickoff Talk Coral Reef Environmental Observatory Network (CREON) Meeting Kenting, Taiwan
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Wildfires, Hydrology, and Microbes: Possible Areas for Collaboration with Calit2
Invited Speaker Desert Research Institute Reno, NV
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Calit2’s UCSD Building a “Living Laboratory” For The Future
Overview Gilbane Higher Education Facilities Forum La Jolla, CA
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Calit2 – CSE’s Living Laboratory for Applications
Guest Lecture UCSD CSE 91 – Perspectives in Computer Science (Fall 07) La Jolla, CA
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Building a Community Cyberinfrastructure to Support Marine Microbial Ecology Metagenomics
Invited Talk Center for Earth Observations and Applications Advisory Committee La Jolla, CA
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Building a Community Cyberinfrastructure to Support Marine Microbial Ecology Metagenomics
Invited Talk 2006 Synthetic Biology Symposium Aliso Creek Inn Laguna Beach, CA
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Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA)
Invited Talk CONNECT Investment Community Meeting Calit2@UCSD La Jolla, CA
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Creating a Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) – Taking Metagenomics to Light Speed
Invited Talk ONR Review Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD La Jolla, CA
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Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA)
Invited Talk CONNECT Board Meeting La Jolla, CA
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Building a Community Cyberinfrastructure to Support Marine Microbial Ecology Metagenomics
Invited Talk Metagenomics 2006 La Jolla, CA
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Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA)
Invited Keynote Annual Meeting CENIC 2006 Oakland, CA
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Toward a Global Interactive Earth Observing Cyberinfrastructure
Invited Talk to the 21st International Conference on Interactive Information Processing Systems (IIPS) for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrology Held at the 85th AMS Annual Meeting San Diego, CA
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grantCommunity Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis
The CAMERA (Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis) community database for metagenomic data deposition is an important first step in developing methods for monitoring microbial communities.
grantProject GreenLight
This project, developing an instrument called GreenLight, measures, monitors, and optimizes the energy consumption of large-scale scientific applications from many different areas.
mediaUC San Diego’s GreenLight Project To Improve Energy Efficiency Of Computing – Photonics Online
The information technology industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon “footprint” as the airline industry. Now scientists and engineers at the University of California, San Diego are building an instrument to test the energy efficiency of computing systems under real-world conditions — with the ultimate goal of getting computer designers and users in the scientific community to re-think the way they do their jobs.
mediaProject Aims To Improve Energy Efficiency Of Computing – ScienceDaily
The IT industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon “footprint” as the airline industry. Now scientists and engineers are building an instrument to test the energy efficiency of computing systems under real-world conditions — with the ultimate goal of getting computer designers and users in the scientific community to rethink the way they do their jobs.
publicationDigital Infrastructure In A Carbon-Constrained World
Larry Smarr, Tom DeFanti, Jerry Sheehan, Rod Tucker, Bill St Arnaud. Presented at Australian American West Coast Leadership Dialogue, January 15, 2009
publicationGreening the Internet in a Carbon-Constrained World – Xconomy
This year marks a turning point in the debate on global climate change. The focus of the discussion is rapidly moving from a scientific analysis of how human activity affects climate change to a political process on how best to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
publicationCampuses as Living Laboratories for the Greener Future
B. St. Arnaud, L. Smarr, J. Sheehan, and T. DeFanti, [invited article] EDUCAUSE Review, 44, 14-33 (2009)
publicationClimate Change and Higher Education – EDUCAUSE Review
B. St. Arnaud, L. Smarr, J. Sheehan, and T. DeFanti, EDUCAUSE Review, Volume 44, pp. 14-33 Published: Friday, October 30, 2009
publicationProject GreenLight: Optimizing Cyberinfrastructure For A Carbon-Constrained World – IEEE Computer
L. Smarr, IEEE Computer, volume 43, number 1, pp.22-27 (2010)
publicationThe Growing Interdependence Of The Internet And Climate Change – IEEE Internet Computing Magazine
Larry Smarr. The Growing Interdependence of the Internet and Climate Change. IEEE Internet Computing, January/February 2010, pp. 18–20.
publicationThe Transition To Intelligent, Secure, Low Carbon, And Climate Adaptive Infrastructure: Some Web Resources
Larry Smarr, Gregory McRae. Presented to the American-Australian Leadership Dialogue panel on “Smart Infrastructure,” held in New York City. July 16, 2010
mediaUC San Diego GreenLight project
Dr. Jürgen P. Schulze describes the immersive visualization application built for the Greenlight Project.
grantEAGER: Wildfire Modeling and Prevention Initiative: Developing a Technical Framework for Integrating Research with Public Policy Decision Support
The need for descriptive and predictive simulation tools to support wildfire prevention, or suppression during future wildfire events, is becoming critical.
mediaWildfire Modeling and Prevention – Newswise
With a one-year grant* from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Cyberinfrastructure, effective June 1, the UC San Diego researchers have opened a new phase for their SDFireSight project. They will develop a technical framework and computer models that will simulate the conditions that can spark a wildfire in San Diego’s ‘backcountry’.
mediaUC San Diego Recieves NSF Support for Wildfire Modeling and Prevention – East County Magazine
Wildfires are increasing in both absolute number and severity in the American southwest and this trend is predicted to continue over decades to come. Wildfire prevention has now become a major priority, and scientists at the University of California, San Diego have received federal funding to devise descriptive and predictive simulation tools to help prevent or suppress wildfires.
mediaUC San Diego, UMD Researchers to Build ‘WIFIRE’ Cyberinfrastructure – UC San Diego Today
Three research organizations at the University of California, San Diego, have been awarded a multi-year National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to build an end-to-end cyberinfrastructure to perform real-time data-driven assessment, simulation, prediction, and visualization of wildfire behavior.
grantWIFIRE: A Scalable Data-Driven Monitoring, Dynamic Prediction and Resilience Cyberinfrastructure for Wildfires
The University of California at San Diego is awarded a grant to build an end-to-end cyberinfrastructure, called WIFIRE, for real-time and data-driven simulation, prediction and visualization of wildfire behavior.
mediaWIFIRE project helps firefighters get a jump on wildfires – UC News
Now, thanks to a multi-year, $2.65 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the University of California San Diego, and the University of Maryland have been building a cyberinfrastructure to better monitor, predict, and mitigate wildfires in the future.
mediaFirefighters get high tech to douse wildfires – PBS News
University of California San Diego computer scientists stitch together information from weather sensors and satellite images to predict where wildfires are moving in real time. All of the images and data is fed into a supercomputer and creates a network of real-time wildfire information. Their cyber infrastructure system, called WIFIRE, analyzes the information to forecast where the fire will move while it is burning.
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publicationTowards an Integrated Cyberinfrastructure for Scalable Data-driven Monitoring, Dynamic Prediction and Resilience of Wildfires
Ilkay Altintas, Jessica Block, Raymond de Callafon, Daniel Crawl, Charles Cowart, Amarnath Gupta, Mai Nguyen, Hans-Werner Braun, Jurgen Schulze, Michael Gollner, Arnaud Trouve, Larry Smarr. Procedia Computer Science, vol. 51, pp 1633-1642. (2015).
publicationUsing Pairwise Difference Features to Measure Temporal Changes in the Microbial Ecology
M. Yazdani, L. Smarr. 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data. IEEE. 10/29/2015.
mediaTechnology Projects to Combat California Wildfires Are Recognized with CENIC Innovation Award
In recognition of work to bring advanced IT and telecommunications to the fight to contain California wildfires, the WIFIRE, HPWREN, and AlertTahoe projects have been selected as recipients of the CENIC 2018 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental Applications.
mediaFirefighters Look to Supercomputers to Combat Wildfires – Spectrum News 1
“Just to imagine what kind of computations are taking place here. It’s mind-blowing,” Ilkay Altintas, Chief Data Science Officer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, told Spectrum News 1.
mediaWIFIRE: Technology to Predict and Prevent the Spread of Wildfires
Researchers at UC San Diego are working on cutting edge technology to combat the constant threat of wildfires in California.
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Professor de Callafon helps build cyber-infrastructure to aid wildfire hazard assessment and response – MAE News
The system will integrate networked observations such as heterogeneous satellite data and real-time remote sensor data, with computational techniques in signal processing, visualization, modeling, and data assimilation to provide a scalable method to monitor such phenomena as weather patterns that can help predict a wildfire’s rate of spread.