Nowadays, many software applications are executed in mobile devices. This poses new challenges on optimizing the limited capacity set by battery life without compromising energy efficiency and performance. In this paper, we propose a framework for mobile applications to enable and evaluate self-adaptability for the purpose of improving energy efficiency without sacrificing performance. Our framework consists of two main parts: the mobile apps simulator and the scheduler.
This paper presents LCAFDB, a crowdsourced database for collecting Life Cycle Assessment data for foodstuff. Such an open database is useful to facilitate the development of feedback systems about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for food. We describe the design challenges encountered while we developed the system and our solutions. We also exemplify by a number of applications developed that use this database.
The objective of this paper is to explain the importance of research in wastewater transportation (sewage systems) using new technologies such as robotics systems and information and communication technologies. ECHORD++ (European Coordination Hub for Open Robotics Development) is a very useful tool to foster this research and to meet needs and solutions. In this paper, authors explain the tool as well as the methodology to promote robotics research in urban environments, and the on-going experience will demonstrate that huge advances are made in this field.
The Internet of Things is greatly changing the buying and consuming behavior. Future scenarios of smart shopping, smart kitchen and smart cooking become increasingly real and integrated. In this context we see current attempts of creating digital receipts in the food retailing industry. Respectively to these attempts, this paper shows that consumers expect a number of added values from the digital receipt, e.g. a higher transparency for a better self-reflection, therefore a more sustainable food consumption and more information about the bought products. We conducted qualitative interviews to find out how people use receipts and what added values they can imagine in terms of a digital receipt to improve their consumption behavior and to reduce food waste. Since all bought products will be registered digitally, it becomes possible to use the shopping data for sustainable consumer apps.
In order to promote a more effective understanding of electricity consumption in households, and leverage the potential of current and future energy conservation initiatives, we have developed an online survey in which visual icons of various electrical devices coupled with a Likert scale are used to investigate people's perception of the amount of electricity consumed by a variety of individual domestic appliances. In this paper we present initial results from a pilot study conducted with 293 participants from over 50 countries and outline our plans for future work. Our initial results suggest that despite a considerable number of respondents was able to give the correct answers, many others seem to lack an understanding of appliance electricity consumption, and thus further work should be carried in this direction.
Energy wasted in buildings is a major fraction of total energy wasted in today's cities. Most people are not aware of inefficiencies and energy wasted in their homes. Making people aware about energy wasted in their homes and inefficiencies in their energy consumption behaviors could contribute to large energy savings at the city scale. Many energy-saving programs, run by the governments, non-profits, or utilities, are designed to help people improve their energy efficiency at homes by providing feedback. The critical factor in the effectiveness of energy saving programs is user engagement. Best energy saving tips will not save noticeable energy if users do not use those tips. In this project, we design several intentionally simple energy saving activities with a goal to help citizens understand how they use energy and find ways to save energy. To evaluate the effectiveness of proposed energy-saving guidelines, 740 volunteers at Oahu, Hawaii are provided smart meters and are asked to follow proposed activities in their daily life. Results from the program indicate that our program helps users reduce their bill by 2.83%, which is comparable with similar programs but the simplicity of our proposed energy saving activities boosted up participation rate to 35%.
Urban pollution is a growing health hazard in many urban centres across the globe. Prominent sources of pollution include diesel and gasoline vehicles, as well as manufacturing plants, power generation processes, and other industrial activity. In order to help understand and address pollution levels, a number of cities are installing sensor arrays; these installations will in future support monitoring and tracking of pollutants, and also underpin a range of possibilities for forecasting and mitigation. In this paper we describe an approach which forecasts the future flow and intensity of pollutants around an urban area, given recent historic sensor streams. The approach employs a cellular automaton, whose parameters are learned and adapted online by an evolutionary algorithm.
Food is a major contributor of greenhouse gases in the world. Changing what you eat to a less greenhouse gas intensive diet can have a major impact on the greenhouse gas emission. While campaigns and efforts about changing diets directed towards individuals have a potential to reduce total greenhouse gases, efforts directed towards institutional producers of meals have much greater potential to have impact since just a few key players need to be affected. In this paper, we describe a system we have developed for calculating carbon footprint for school meals, making it possible for decisions makers to compare schools with each other, and identify schools with both low footprint (who can serve as good examples) and schools with high footprints (who have the greatest possibility to change). Preliminary results from 10 schools in the Stockholm area are also presented.
Collecting and analyzing power consumption data from electrical appliances is a key enabling element for grid-related services, e.g., load forecasting or anomaly detection. Device-level sensors (smart plugs) have found widespread use to collect such data. However, they prevalently report an electrical appliance's power consumption at a rate of one reading per second in order to limit the resultant communication traffic. With mains voltage frequencies of 50/60 Hz, undersampling and the consequent loss of spectral information result from the use of such reporting rates. Moreover, as most smart plugs only report real power consumption values, important supplementary features (e.g., the phase shift between voltage and current or the magnitude of reactive power) are not available when using such devices. In this work we present a data processing system design that exploits the recurring nature of electrical current waveforms in order to facilitate the provision of data at a high resolution whilst keeping the corresponding data rate requirements low. Our design, called ALSCEAM, is applicable to voltage and current waveforms collected at high sampling rates, thus spectral components are implicitly included in collected traces. Instead of transferring raw readings to external processing services, however, local data processing routines are being employed to detect and eliminate redundancies. Thus, a high data fidelity is maintained while network traffic is reduced by more than 95% in many cases. All functionalities are implemented in a proof-of-concept system design and evaluated in practice.
This work in progress presents some initial findings concerning the use of gamification and persuasive technology in the domain of reaching a set sustainability goal by using persuasive systems. Both gamification and persuasive technology have become more pervasive elements in the research community in the domain of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information systems. This paper argues for research addressing the designing of these systems since we currently have a vague understanding of the important underlying mechanism. Sustainability is genuinely complex and the designer of a persuasive system with a set sustainability goal must consider numerous parameters when designing the artefact.
Increasing energy literacy has been identified as an important topic in order to help people understand their energy use and thereby enabling them to reduce their energy use. We have developed a tangible interface for helping people learn about energy by using wooden blocks as representation of several common cases of energy use. These are then placed on a digital scale connected to a computer which visualizes how many solar panels are required to power these.
This work is focused on studying the immediacy of eco-feedback and the appropriation of these systems in households' daily life. This paper describes the development of Wattapp, a common two spots wall socket redesigned to display the current consumption using a set of LED lights, which change from green to red according to the consumption. The device was evaluated for fifteen days in the cafeteria/lounge of a research institute and a subset of six users were interviewed to assess how Wattapp was perceived. In general, users understood the feedback. In addition, our evaluation disclosed how such device could be used in the day-to-day lives, for example, comparing the consumption of electrical devices or used to remotely control appliances.
Current approaches for collecting and labeling NonIntrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) datasets still rely heavily on a lengthy and error prone manual inspection of the whole dataset. Consequently, it is still difficult to find fully labeled datasets that could help furthering even more the research in this field. In an attempt to overcome this situation, we propose a hardware and software platform to collect and label NILM sensor data in a semi-automatic labeling fashion. Our platform combines aggregate and plug-level smart-meters to measure consumption data, software algorithms to automatically detect changes in the different monitored loads and a graphical user interface where the end-user can supervise the labeling process. In this paper, we describe the different components that comprise our platform. We also present the results of one live deployment that was performed to test the feasibility of our approach. The results of the deployment show that our system was capable of explaining about 82% of the aggregate load, and automatically detect 94% of the power transitions in the plug-level loads.
We developed a game in virtual reality to make players experience an underwater environment and to increase their awareness towards a sustainable behaviour while diving. The game was tested with the Presence Questionnaire during a Science Festival in November 2016. The assumption was that a high degree of presence due to their immersion into the virtual environment would enhance players' empathy for the marine environment and, as a consequence, would make them more sensitive to sustainability and environmental issues related to diving. Our data show that players across various age categories did indeed feel immersed and involved in the game. However, we could not specifically test whether their level of environmental awareness had increased after playing this game.
Computational sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field with the overarching goal of developing computational models, methods, and tools to help manage the balance between environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. I will provide examples of computational sustainability problems, ranging from wildlife conservation and biodiversity, to poverty mitigation, to materials discovery for renewable energy materials. I will also highlight cross-cutting computational themes and challenges at the intersection of constraint reasoning, optimization, machine learning, citizen science, and crowd-sourcing.
Approximately one third of the world food production is wasted, although the food would still be appropriate for consumption. The project described in this paper is targeting this problem by developing cooling stations containing an information system to access their contents. These cooling stations are supposed to be deployed in public places in a European city. The important advantage of such an approach is that it conforms to legal regulations concerning food distribution and consumption, in contrast to simple public refrigerators. Two studies were conducted to assess whether such cooling stations can be used for food sharing purposes — a field test and focus groups. These investigations indicate that relevant stakeholders find such cooling stations helpful. Nevertheless, there are still problems concerning trust, especially in the quality of the food offered through food sharing when there is a large anonymous community. The paper outlines possible solutions for this problem.
Serious games have attracted much attention recently and are used to in an engaging way support for example education and behavior change. In this paper, we present a serious game designed for helping people learn about their own energy consumption and to support behavior change towards more sustainable energy habits. We have designed the game for all the four Bartle Player Types, a taxonomy used to identify different motivations for playing games. Engagement of the participants has been evaluated using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, and we have measured self-assessed future behavior change. We found a statistically significant positive correlation between self-assessed future behavior change and perceived value/usefulness of the application independent of player type. Our study indicates the player type “Achievers” might perform better using this type of application and find it more enjoyable, but that it can be useful for learning energy conserving behavior independent of player type.
We develop and evaluate a methodology for running manual implicit and explicit Demand Response campaigns in order to improve the sustainability of smart grids. Initially, we introduce a flexibility profiling engine that relies on the correlation among end-user's consumption, prices and environmental conditions. Then, we investigate two mechanisms so that an Aggregator, acting as an intermediate between the Distribution System Operator or Retailer and the consumers, achieves the desired demand flexibility. More precisely we introduce: (i) a price-based mechanism that determines the new price that consumers will be paying during the DR campaign, and (ii) a reward-based mechanism that determines which set of consumers should participate in the campaign, along with the load flexibility to be asked from each one and the reward offered. The proposed methodology is evaluated using a publicly-available dataset. It is seen that the CES model achieves high estimation accuracy. Also, the economic metrics obtained using both price-based and reward-based mechanisms, are more favorable than the ones obtained by the dynamic prices actually applied and by a naive reward-based method rewards, respectively.
In this paper, we describe ViTFlow, a platform to visualize tourists flows, integrating different data sources into a rich interactive map-based visualization. The data are collected using low-cost routers, enabling wi-fi passive tracking, and sensors, detecting environmental conditions, spread over the Madeira Islands. Different types of data can be visualized in the map-based interface, including spatio-temporal mobility data (i.e., movements between places and common paths taken by tourists), airplane and cruise ship traffic, weather information, and official events. We designed the interface with the aim of providing citizens and tourists with a public display to facilitate a dialog between the different communities, exploiting synergies to promote the sustainability of the archipelago.
The intersection between software engineering research and the problems related to sustainability and green IT has been the subject of increasing attention. In spite of that, we observe that sustainability is still not clearly defined, or understood, in the field of software engineering. This lack of clarity leads to confusion about e.g. what is relevant to measure or the research implications over time or space. This paper provides an overview of how the research so far has defined sustainability, and how this definition has been used to guide which research areas. To this end, we carried out a systematic mapping study for selecting, classifying and analyzing relevant publications. In this study, we investigate which knowledge areas and which time scope of sustainability effects are mostly targeted in scientific research. Our analysis shows research trends and discusses gaps to be filled.
