Green Software and Human Actors: design, code, and behavior - community workshop

Community Workshop
Co-located with ICT4S 2023 conference
Rennes, France

Today, the Internet infrastructure is about to replace most of the communication and information broadcasting infrastructures built during the XIX and XX centuries and expand it to every country all over the world. The energy cost of such a holistic and automated information system is a core and dual, human and technology question. Energy costs include server-side costs, routing costs, and client-side energy costs. Human factors include satisfying end-user needs, giving control, and taking into account daily life constraints.

Research communities in ICT started tackling energy consumption questions at least since humanity started facing energy crisis and climate crisis. Those investigations built several skills on various topics, ranging from technical solutions and approaches (such as measuring software consumption, optimizing hardware and network, software eco-design), to social and behavioral approaches (such as changing user behaviors), to design approaches (such as designing green web pages, or designing green interfaces).

Achieving the ambitious goals for sustainability requires collaboration between different research disciplines and domains, as the impact of technological-only optimizations slows down. In this community workshop, we aim to build bridges between green software and green IT, UX/UI design, and behavioral studies. The workshop will bring communities together to share ideas and design, build and sustain the next generation of sustainable computing, involving human actors (such as end users, developers, and deciders).

Program:

This full-day workshop aims at building community. We expect people from academia, industry, and local governments. We will discuss three major research questions:

  1. How to guide user interface designers for energy-efficient interaction?
  2. How to assist end users for energy-efficient interaction?
  3. How to provide data to end users for energy-efficient digital behavior?

Final Program Presentations and Talks:

Thanks for all participants to the workshop and to the speakers, for the great day we spend exploring the issue of green software, design and human actors. Here are the slides for the presentations and talks during the workshop.

Preliminary detailled program:

  • 11:00: Welcome, and research challenges
  • 11:30: Keynote: Aurélie Baton (EcoByDesign, UX designer, sustainable design)

Eco-design: What is the role of design in building sustainable services?

Eco-design is part of a wider sustainability approach and requires every member of the project to be involved. UX/UI design has a big part to play in making a sustainable project. In this talk, we’ll go through the basics of eco-design, some best practices that can be applied to your projects, and some examples you can get inspiration from.

Aurélie is a freelance UX designer, she tries to combine eco-design, systemic design and accessibility to build more sustainable products. She is also a member of Designers Ethiques, a French NGO that focuses on topics related to the responsibility of designers.

  • 12:30: Lunch
  • 14:00: Talk: Adel Noureddine (Université of Pau and Pays de l'Adour)

Software Energy Efficiency: Between Technical and Human Approaches

Improving the energy efficiency of software systems is often addressed through technical approaches, such as software optimizations or eco-design. One area often neglected is the important role played by users to drive energy reductions. In this talk, we talk about the necessity of mixing technical and human approaches to tackle software energy in a holistic approach. All actors around software, from end users, to developers or automated systems, need to participate in the efforts towards sustainable and green software. We outline the challenges and explore new research directions around green software engineering.

Adel Noureddine is an associate professor in computer science at the University of Pau and Pays de l'Adour. He works on Green IT, green and empirical software engineering, and autonomic computing. In particular, he works on measuring and understanding the factors impacting software energy, and the role of end users in reducing the environmental impacts of computing systems.

  • 14:30: Talk: Guillaume Rivière (Estia Institute of Technology)

HCI and Climate Change: Toward New Directions

Researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have studied sustainability concerns the last two decades and showed the limits of approaches based on energy consumption decrease. This talk will put Sustainable HCI in a broader context in order to draw some new directions for future research, such as energy cleanliness.

Guillaume Rivière is Assistant Professor at ESTIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction (2009) and his research focuses on Tangible User Interfaces. After applying tangible interfaces to geoscience and archaeology, he now investigates electricity consumption through tangible interfaces on public spaces.

  • 15:00: Voluntary Pesentations
Shaping the hidden environmental impacts of software
 
Thibault Simon, Pierre Rust, Romain Rouvoy
Orange Labs, University of Lille, Inria
 
Software engineers are used to working on large-scale systems, both in size and distribution among users. The scalability of these software systems builds on multiple abstraction levels, which hide the underlying infrastructure under higher-level management tools. However, these abstractions levels also hide the hardware footprint imposed by software, and the related environmental impacts. Furthermore, these impacts are often considered only partially, as resource usage without accounting for their manufacturing, and reported from the perspective of a single category (climate change), while other categories, such as resource depletion, land use, or human toxicity are left out. Unfortunately, the ICT sector heavily relies on precious materials, which scarcity makes their extraction and transformation process highly environmentally impactful. We, therefore, show how adopting a more holistic perspective on hardware resources consumed by software can provide stakeholders with actionable insights, to adopt effective actions to reduce its environmental footprint.
 
Beyond energy : when software makes hardware obsolete
 
Aurélien Tabard, Edlira Nano, Lea Mosesso, Nolwenn Maudet, Camille Adam, Thomas Thibau
Université Claude Bernard-lyon 1, Inria Lille, Université de Strasbourg, CNRS

Green IT often focuses on improving software efficiency through better code, more efficient deployments, better allocating computation, etc. The end goal being to reduce energy consumption. These efficiency efforts are useful and needed, but history shows us that they suffer from rebound effects. Improvements lead to increases in consumption.

We will present a complementary approach to green software : designing software so that hardware can last longer. Indeed, while digital obsolescence is often associated to hardware that becomes outdated or to marketing generating novel demand, we observe that software is also a source of perceived obsolescence.

We will briefly present various projects investigating how to design for aging devices, from UX to software engineering. We will also outline upcoming work investigating how software influences hardware obsolescence, and the replacement of devices.

Coca4AI : How to measure and raise the awareness of data scientists ?

Paul Gay
GreenAI

The growing environmental impact of our digital practices is partly due to the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence. Thus, it seems relevant to measure the footprint of these algorithms, at the source, in the data centers in order to benefit from a controlled environment allowing accurate measurements, and to raise the awareness of data scientists, who have an important role in this development. We propose to estimate the carbon footprint and assess the "environmental impact"/"algorithm accuracy" trade-off for deep learning algorithms at data center scale: algorithm iteration, user , node, entire infrastructure. The application context will be centered on the LabIA, a cluster of 12 stations dedicated to AI and used by 5 laboratories. The feedback provided to users will have two objectives: (i) detect bad practices and improve energy efficiency and user experience (ii) Increase awareness regarding the impact of their practices, both arising from the energy that their algorithms use on the cluster, and the consequences and rebound effects of the applications they develop. The data collected will make it possible to identify new opportunities applicable to other large data centers such as the Jean-Zay data center.

  • 15:30: Break
  • 16:00: Passionate discussion & continue workshop presentations
  • 17:30: Closing session

Voluntary 10-min presentations:

Proposals (an abstract of up to 500 words depicting the speaker's presentation) for 10-minute presentations need to be submitted by the deadline. Abstracts and presentation slides will be published on the website of the workshop.
Please login or create an account to view the submission link. If you have any troubles, you can contact us or submit your abstract by email to both of us.

Important dates:

  • Proposal deadline: 7 April 2023
  • Notification of acceptance: 14 April 2023
  • Workshop day: 05 June 2023

Organizers:

  • Dr Adel Noureddine
    Associate Professor in computer science at the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour, France
  • Dr Guillaume Rivière
    Assistant Professor in computer science at the Estia Institute of Technology, France
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