Enjoyed the final knowledge exchange event at Friends House Euston for the http://flipgig.org project on 29th April. If you want to find out how to improve conditions for gig delivery workers and sustainability of last mile logistics, then check out the slides and posters on our website. You may also find our briefing note (white paper) of interest.
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.”
The real climate and transformative impact of ICT
As part of a research project involving Adrian and I, we recently published a paper at Patterns on ‘The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations’.
In this paper, we find that ICT forms somewhere between 2.1-3.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions when ICT’s full supply chains and environmental impacts are considered. We also uncover the assumptions that underpin experts’ estimates of ICT’s environmental impact, explore ICT trends which could increase the sector’s emissions, and find that sector-wide compliance is required to ensure ICT aligns with the Paris Agreement.
Read the full paper here. This work was also picked up by major news outlets including the Telegraph, the Times, Yahoo News, Phys.org, the Daily Mail UK, MSN and BBC Radio 4!
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.
Kathy’s paper on thermal comfort and older women
Looking forward to Kathy’s talk at CHI next week on thermal comfort and older women. Get a sneak preview here!
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
Fairness and Sustainability in the Gig Economy?
PDRA advertised work with us! Closes 14th Feb
We’re looking for a Research Associate to work on the development of novel software tools to help businesses analyse multi-dimensional energy and contextual data within the recently awarded, £1.6M EPSRC “Reducing end use Energy Demand in Commercial Settings Through Digital Innovation” programme, together with a number of major UK industrial partners. Closes 14th Feb. Find out more.
Call for participants for ‘ICT Prioritisation’ project
In the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, we are conducting a study into how ICT (Information Communication Technology) researchers and technologists prioritise and negotiate ICT innovation for sustainable future.
If you are a researcher or technologist in the ICT sector, please consider participating.
The study consists of a short demographic survey and an online group interview with other researchers/technologists via Teams. The group interview will last no longer than an hour, will be scheduled at a time to suit you and the other participants, and will involve:
– reflecting on your experiences of working in ICT,
– discussing what innovation topics you and other participants think the ICT sector should prioritise, including a ‘prioritisation exercise’ to help you negotiate and make these decisions collectively as a group,
– and your feedback on the ‘prioritisation exercise’.
As a thank you for your time, a £10 Amazon voucher will be given to you.
If you are interested in participating, please contact the primary researcher:
Kelly Widdicks
k.v.widdicks@lancaster.ac.uk
Internet Demand in the Media
In the past few weeks, our work investigating Internet demand and streaming has had a lot of attention in the media. This comes after our paper ‘Streaming, Multi-Screens and YouTube: The New (Unsustainable) Ways of Watching in the Home’ (authored by Kelly Widdicks, Mike Hazas, Oliver Bates and Adrian Friday) was published and presented by Kelly at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this May.
The prominence of streaming, and the push for Internet infrastructure expansion to cope with the growth in demand, is important to consider due to the underlying energy impacts from the Internet infrastructure. Streaming accounts for perhaps 3% of global electricity demand, and is expected to grow further year-on-year. This growth is expected on broadband and fixed access networks, as well as mobile cellular networks (4G) which are particularly energy-intensive.
We investigated the prominence of streaming in everyday life through qualitative interview data with participants, alongside quantitative logs from wifi routers deployed into participants’ homes for one month. We uncovered new ways in which watching is becoming increasingly unsustainable, including: streaming is becoming the default way to watch, with broadcast TV access and DVDs becoming obsolete; and the increase in ‘multi-watching’, whereby households are simultaneously streaming content.
These findings gained an interest from the Environment Editor at the Sunday Times, Jonathan Leake. Through correspondence with Mike and Kelly, Jonathan wrote an article on our work ‘Energy used in streaming one film on Netflix makes 60 cuppas’. It was also picked up by Channel News in Australia and The Sun, among others. Following this, Kelly and Mike were interviewed by The Naked Scientists (article: ‘Video streaming habits affect electricity use’); the podcast created from this interview was aired on national radio BBC Radio 5 Live (Sunday 19th May) and ABC Australia Radio (Friday 24th May). Kelly and Mike participated in a live radio interview for BBC Radio Nottingham (aired the morning of Monday 20th May). And finally, we answered a list of written questions for IBC365, an online publication for the media and entertainment industry (article: `The real green screen: Is OTT putting pressure on the planet?’). We really enjoyed talking about our work to these wider audiences, and hope that awareness of the issue surrounding Internet demand will start to increase.
For readers who want to find out more, you can read Lancaster University’s press release (‘Research sheds light on UK’s new unsustainable viewing habits’) or access our paper via the DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300696.