Keynote: Leveraging Big Data and Data Mining to Rethink Traditional Sustainability Metrics

The current profusion of data and the power of novel data mining techniques offer unique opportunities to rethink how sustainability is measured. Indeed, sustainability is an inherently complex notion that can be particularly difficult to quantify. While having access to more data is desirable, new data mining techniques can also be used to further help us better measure sustainability. In this talk, I will make a case to rethink current sustainability metrics and briefly discuss how data mining can help extract more information about how a system is performing. I will then describe some of the work we are pursuing at the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory. In particular, we have developed and applied a Network-based Frequency Analysis (NFA) technique to track the relative performance of individual entities (e.g., the performance of a country compared to the global trend) using concepts from social network analysis.