Proceedings of the 2014 conference ICT for Sustainability

We live in the age of Big Data, yet many areas of environmental management are still suffering from a lack of relevant data, information and knowledge that impedes sound decision making. A highly relevant phenomenon is therefore the so-called citizen observatories whereby the observations of ordinary...

The rapid and continuous development of information and communication technology (ICT) in society today is providing new means for various societal activities. To facilitate that new ICT solutions reduce environmental impacts and bring social improvements the potential impacts of those new solutions...

Existing buildings are responsible for more than 40% of the world’s total primary energy consumption. Current building management systems fail to reduce unnecessary energy consumption and preserve user comfort at the same time mainly because they are unable to cope with dynamic changes caused by user’s...

Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be...

Many media technology and computer science engineering students suffer from the preconceived opinion that sustainability is at best peripheral, and at worst irrelevant to their education. In this paper we discuss our experiences of integrating sustainability and ICT4S into a media technology engineering...

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday...

How can we take householders from being disengaged passive energy consumers towards being highly motivated retrofitting energy saving masters In this paper the ”Power law of engagement model for energy saving” is introduced, which breaks down the process of engaging householders into 8 defined stages....

There are contrasting ways to understand the Web: as global technical infrastructure, the largest ever information construct, and as social new media. Existing communities of ICT for sustainability, such as environmental informatics, Green ICT, and even the more recent sustainable HCI, tend to focus...

Evaluating the energy efficiency of software applications currently is an ad-hoc affair, since no practical and idely applicable model exists for this purpose. The need for such an evaluation model is pressing given the sharp increase in energy demand generated by the ICT industry. In particular, we...

Assessments of digital services wishing to take into account an energy footprint of the Internet typically require models of the energy intensity of the Internet. A common approach to the modeling of the energy intensity is to combine estimates of market surveys of installed network devices on a national...

Cloud Computing is often regarded as form of "green computing". However, the growth of cloud computing also goes hand in hand with an increasing demand for energy, caused by a continuously growing demand for content, data-intensive applications and bandwidth. The debates on the energy implications of...

The progress of technological development and the resulting rapid replacement of end-user devices has brought increasing issues of electronics waste upon our society. Interaction designers and researchers within the field of Human-Computer Interaction have begun to tackle issues of environmental sustainability...

This paper describes an agent-based analysis approach to determine in which way a net zero house can be obtained. In particular, it addresses agent-based simulation to estimate annual energy usage for heating based on an air to water heat pump. Based on the introduced approach house owners will be able...

Green software is currently gaining interests with the increasing impact of IT in energy consumption. Green-ness in software however, can be achieved at various stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Consequently, several software engineering concepts can be adopted for achieving greener...

A key focus in transforming the profession of ICT to one of contributing to a sustainable future is the education of students who may think and act as sustainable practitioners in computing. An important understanding in this is the relationship between ethics and sustainability in the student intake....

Sustainability research about using Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to reduce household energy consumption has recently focused on two potential strategies: “smart homes” that rely on sensors and technological innovations to automatically reduce the energy load, and tools that seek...

This paper presents preliminary findings from a big data analysis and GIS to identify the efficiency of waste management and transportation in the City of Stockholm. The aim of this paper is to identify inefficiencies in waste collection routes in the city of Stockholm, and to suggest potential improvements....

Sustainability is a normative concept, building on ideas such as justice, equity and responsibility, and based on human culture and society. Computers, internet, and the technologies that are central in our network society embed also normative values and are part of a cultural context. But the work looking...

In this work, three of many ICT-specific challenges of LCA are discussed. First, the inconsistency versus uncertainty is reviewed with regard to the meta-technological nature of ICT. As an example, the semiconductor technologies are used to highlight the complexities especially with respect to energy...

In research and development of information and communication technologies for sustainability, there is a strong belief that human behaviour can be monitored at the individual level to generate different signals, and that these signals can be used to influence individuals to behave differently. We analyse...

This document presents the Web Energy Archive (WEA) project led by the Green Code Lab. This tools aims at measuring the computer resource consumption (energy, memory…) of the loading of a website in a browser. Firstly, considering the measure of 500 websites, website behavior can be characterized in...

This paper explores how companies and other stakeholders could assess the macro-level enabling potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), in other words, the ability of ICT to reduce the negative sustainability impact of other industry sectors at a society level, and identifies some...

Modern hardware devices that are idle for a certain period of time enter into sleep mode as a means of reducing power consumption. Naturally, devices should remain in sleep mode for as long as possible to maximize energy savings. However, a growing number of applications perform non-urgent background...

This paper presents the methodology and results of an exhaustive text-mining analysis performed on the subject “Dematerialization and Environment”. Three main fields have been investigated: international academic publications (documents extracted from the Web of Science database during the period 1994-2013),...

Though rapid increase in energy consumption has become a global problem, most of the solutions developed to address it for residential consumers are based on qualitative studies conducted with small numbers of users, typically in the developed world. Recent work has begun to explore consumption practices,...

During the past 50 years, the media channels, the media consumption patterns and the entire influence of media in society have changed dramatically. Looking into the future, the pace of change is not likely to decrease. In order to prepare for the future, it is important to increase our understanding...

The mobile phone market is constantly evolving. Retailers and manufacturers offer a larger number of features to customers: a mobile network more and more efficient (2G, 3G then 4G), handsets with computer features, navigation, gaming, etc. This progress involves the use of more efficient and reduced...

If information and communication technologies (ICT) are to bring about a transformational change to a sustainable society, then we need to transform our thinking. Computer professionals already have a conceptual toolkit for problem solving, sometimes known as computational thinking. However, computational...

Mobile technology offers great opportunities for renewing corporations’ sustainability agenda. In particular, the positive impact can be increased and new segments of people can be engaged. Gaming for Good is an area that combines the most popular mobile applications, games, with sustainability ingredients....

The predicted manifestations of global climate change are diverse and extensive. Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) offer great potential to enable and enhance climate change adaptation projects, programmes and activities. As yet these roles have received relatively little systematic...

In the paper a concept of an ICT system for complex management of whole city is presented. The ICT system called Smart City consist of several branch modules integrated by a GIS platform. The system is being developed by the Systems Research Institute (IBS PAN) in Warsaw in cooperation with Intergraph...

How could use of ICTs make transport systems in large cities sustainable To what degree would then everyday patterns of action, in which use of ICT is becoming increasingly integrated, be an effective force in such sustainable development In this paper we use own and other ethnographic studies of how...

In this paper we present the findings of an in-depth consultation with 50 experts in Agriculture and ICT. The qualitative study explored how ICTs, particularly mobile phones, could be used to accelerate the uptake of Sustainable Agriculture in Africa. Situating the responses in a broad literature review,...

Recently, data centres have been called out for their particularly high energy consumption, which already accounts for 1.5% of the total global electricity consumption and is among the world’s fastest growing energy consumptions. To reduce the data centres’ environmental impacts, technologies such as...

The information and communications technologies (ICT) sector is seeking to reduce the electricity consumption of data processing centres. Among the initiatives to improve energy efficiency is the shift to cloud computing technology. Thanks to very favourable geographical conditions, the Canadian energy...

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been ascribed an important role for decreasing energy use and mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in urban areas. Through automation, dematerialisation, persuasion and soft transformation ICT holds the potential of making urban life more sustainable,...

With the introduction of materials specific legislation, such as RoHS in 2003, the pace of change of materials in the electronics industry has seen a dramatic increase. Changing materials is costly, and an important business need is the development of a process to select alternatives that will not need...

The emergence of LED public lighting systems have encouraged offering wider range of public light utilization for services other than ambient lighting. Existing literature has highlighted engagement with issues relevant to energy management, visual health, environmental pollution, public security, and...

With the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the rapid growths of Asian cities attract global attention on urban connectivity in the world network. Taking Shanghai as an example, this essay seeks to unpack the question of its changing position in Asian ICT network and ICT’s...

We present the design and evaluation of the heat recovery system for KTH’s Lindgren, Stockholm’s fastest supercomputer, a Cray XE6. Lindgren came into service in 2010 and has since been primarily used for complex numeric simulations of fluid mechanics and computational chemistry and biology. The heat...

Sustainability management systems are important technologies used by large organisations to monitor and control their CO2 emissions and other environmental impacts. So far, these systems have been designed to support data collection and reporting mandated by regulations, but they provide little support...

Degradation of the natural environment is presently attracting significant attention among the Information Systems (IS) academic community. Consequently, the subject of sustainability continues to gain a foothold in the mainstream of IS research. However, as the body of research grows, the exact meaning...

The widespread adoption of cloud computing is having a big impact on the environment since the energy consumption of data centers and the resulting emissions are significantly increasing. Researchers and practitioners in this field are looking for methods to improve the energy efficiency of data centers...

Energy and environmental sustainability can benefit a lot from advances in data mining and machine learning techniques. However, those advances rely on the availability of relevant datasets required to develop, improve and validate new techniques. Only recently the first datasets were made publicly available...

This paper explores whether it is useful to view the fundamental ideas behind the smart city concept through the lens of the ‘Public Value Management’ (PVM) paradigm. It investigates how appropriate ICT investment in cities might be articulated and valued through the concept of PVM. In order to achieve...

Sales statistics of computing devices show that users are not replacing units one by one, but rather adding additional devices to their hardware portfolios. In this paper, the authors describe the outcomes of a first attempt to quantify the ecological implications of these changes in the use of the ICT...

Recent years have seen a rapid growth of ICT-services related to the transportation area, and for example Advanced Travel Information Services (ATIS) have been proposed as one means to achieve a decrease of environmental impacts of transportation through behavioural change. However, empirical studies...

ICT is known to have three orders of impact: direct, indirect and systemic. The first is often regarded as 'part of the problem', the latter two can also be 'part of the solution' to reduce the global environmental impact of human activities. A number of studies show that the impact of ICT itself is...

This paper reports results from an empirical study that explored the potential of interactive electricity Demand- Shifting – a particular form of behavior change where electricity consumption is shifted towards times of the day when production is at its highest – in the context of residential solar electricity...