Thoroughly enjoyed talking about the missing context to energy data time-series with the good folks at Keele in software & systems and Digital Society. Check out the slides.
ICT
Enjoying the Pentland Centre for Sustainability ‘transforming tomorrow’ podcast series
Really interesting series of podcasts exploring sustainability in business and sustainable infrastructures. There’s even an episode this week by your truly on ICT and its impacts.
Infinite growth without environmental impact?
Delighted to see our short article in the IES’ Environmental Scientist magazine making the case for ‘climate proportional computing’ is now available as open access!
ARINZRIT digital research infrastructure sustainability report published!
UK research increasingly relies on ‘digital research infrastructure’ (DRI): digital technologies and computational facilities from laptops to high-performance computing and large-scale data archives. DRI has an energy and carbon impact as a result of performing computational work (emissions scope 1), the energy needed to drive them and how this is generated (scope 2), and their manufacture and disposal (scope 3). In our report, we outline our key findings and offer recommendations for more sustainable DRI policy and practice. Our recommendations also demonstrate that interventions should not just be technical, but also to training, procurement and research culture! Read more: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7966424.
Digital Futures Distinguished Lecture on ICT Impacts
Was delighted to be hosted by Digital Futures @ KTH in Sweden, especially the fantastic folks at Sustainable Futures Lab in Media Technology and Interaction Design (funded by Digital Futures’ excellent Scholar in Residence Programme). As part of this, I got to do a talk on estimates of ICT’s impact and my thoughts on the narratives embedded in this (will efficiency and green energy save ICT from its impacts, is it exceptional and does it enable carbon savings in other domains?). Check it out on YouTube. My sincere thanks to my hosts for being exceptionally supportive, passionate and kind – and of course for all the Fika and sustainability discussions!
Advance ICT Keynote on IoT and Sustainability
Delighted to be able to participate with my keynote talk in the SFI Centre for Research Training in Advanced Networks for Sustainable Societies (ADVANCE CRT) annual event. Where I talked about the role of ICT and IoT in achieving a more sustainable future, and why many existing ‘efficiency’ narratives are simply too limited and just contribute to a discourse of delay. Slides are now available on slideshare.
Digital detox – rethinking data centre design (podcast)
Delighted to see our podcast interview with Hoare Lee published yesterday, drawing on our Patterns article and the Royal Society DTAP report. Kelly and I talking about the energy and carbon impacts of ICT, and reflecting on how we might start to think about accounting and governing this. We definitely namecheck Kelly’s new project (Paris-DE) focusing on ‘Paris compliant computing’ (read more).
Podcast context: “A digital detox is a common new year’s resolution, and the planet needs one on an industrial scale – our everyday internet actions contributing considerably to the climate emergency.”
Talk on impacts of ICT to ISMB special session on ‘Computational Biology going Green’
Really enjoyed my talk and panel discussion at ISMB on considering impacts of both AI on energy footprint, but also the wider impacts of academic practice including conferences. [Talk slides]. I followed excellent and thought provoking talks by Roy Schwartz stressing increased need for reporting of computational budgets, and making efficiency an evaluation criterion for research alongside accuracy and related measures (toward ‘Green AI’); and Loïc Lannelongue on their ‘green algorithms’ project (link) – which estimates the energy/carbon intensity of AI on GPU clusters given a set of parameters.
How video streaming impacts the Earth
SDS Alumni Prof. Mike Hazas recent piece on CNN about the impacts of ICT and watching.
Watching Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube have exploded during the pandemic. But streaming video has a growing and significant environmental impact that goes far beyond your tv or phone. Find out more!
Prof. Mike Hazas