Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Smart and Autonomous Systems for Sustainability

We are pleased to present the special issue on “Smart and Autonomous Systems for Sustainability: Sustainable Computing and Computing for Sustainability.” We are witnessing the rise of the data-driven science paradigm, in which massive amounts of streaming data—much of it collected as a side-effect of ordinary human activity—can be analyzed to make sense and be able to make intelligent decisions for sustainability over multiple time scales (e.g., short-term versus long-term planning). Intuitively, sustainability refers to the ability to maintain a certain performance or efficiency over time. This concept in the context of computing systems can be seen as sustainable computing—computing systems that maintain a certain performance reliably by consuming low power for a very long period of time. To enable sustainable computing, we need adaptive approaches for managing the computing resources and methods for improving reliability and security of computing systems.