Sustainability in Computing
The growing use of computing and proliferation of computing devices requires a holistic focus on sustainability as the environmental impacts of computing technologies go beyond their energy consumption. Environmental impacts span all stages of the lifecycle – manufacturing, operation, and disposal. A sustainability mindset must permeate all organizations involved in design, manufacturing, operation, and disposal/recycling of computational devices. This panel will discuss current and new research on sustainability in computing that spans the full lifecycle, all layers of the computing stack and across the computing spectrum from edge to cloud. The panel will also discuss potential cross-disciplinary approaches to sustainable computing and new notions and metrics to quantify sustainability.
Co-Moderators
Prof. Gurdip Singh, NSF and George Mason University, USA
Prof. Gregory Abowd, Northeastern University, USA
Panelists
Prof. Andrew Chien, University of Chicago, USA
Prof. Alex Jones, NSF, USA
Prof. Ravinder Dahiya, Northeastern University, USA
Prof. Josiah Hester, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Prof. Bashima Islam, Worcester Polytechnic Institue, USA
Biographies
Gurdip Singh is the Divisional Dean for the School of Computing at George Mason University. He was previously Division Director for Computer and Network Systems in the CISE Directorate at National Science Foundation. He has also served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs of the College of Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University and as Department Head of Computer Science at Kansas State University. Dr. Singh earned his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from SUNY, Stony Brook in 1989 and 1991 respectively, and his B. Tech degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi in 1986. His research and teaching interests include real-time embedded systems, sensor networks, network protocols and distributed computing.
Gregory D. Abowd is the Dean of the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, where he is also a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with affiliate appointments in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, Dr. Abowd was faculty in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology for over 26 years, where he held the titles of Regents’ Professor and J.Z. Liang Endowed Chair in the School in Interactive Computing. His research falls largely in the area of Human-Computer Interaction with an emphasis on applications and technology development for mobile and ubiquitous computing in everyday settings. His research has introduced innovations in the classroom, the home, for stakeholders connected with autism, and, most recently, sustainable forms of computing. Dr. Abowd is a Fellow of the ACM and an elected member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy. He was a 2009 recipient of the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Honors Mathematics (summa cum laude) from the University of Notre Dame in 1986 as well as a Master of Science (1987) and Doctor of Philosophy (1991) in Computation from the University of Oxford, where he attended as a Rhodes Scholar.
Andrew Chien is the William Eckhardt Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratories. He is well-known for his research on datacenter management, renewable energy and sustainability, cloud resource management and software, large-scale system architecture, and graph computing architecture. Dr. Chien currently serves on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee and DARPA ISAT. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He served at EiC of Communications of the ACM, 2017-2022, and Vice President of Research at Intel Corporation from 2005-2010. He has served on the Faculty of the University of Illinois and the University of California, San Diego. He received all three of his degrees, BS, MS, and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Alex Jones received the BS degree in 1998 in physics from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, USA, and the MS and PhD degrees in 2000 and 2002, respectively, in ECE from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. He is a Professor of ECE and CS at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He is currently serving as a Program Director at the US NSF in the CNS Division of the CISE Directorate. Dr. Jones’ research interests include compilation for configurable systems and architectures, scaled and emerging memory, reliability and fault tolerance, quantum computing, and sustainable computing. He is the author of more than 200 publications in these areas. His research is funded by the NSF, DARPA, NSA, ARO, private foundations, and industry. He is an active member of program committees in the computer architecture, design automation, and sustainable computing areas. He is the steering committee chair for the IEEE International Green and Sustainable Computing Conference, an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers, and Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems Journal. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the ACM.
Ravinder Dahiya is Professor in the Department Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. His group (Bendable Electronics and Sustainable Technologies (BEST)) conducts research in flexible printed electronics, electronic skin, and their applications in robotics, prosthetics, wearables, and interactive systems. He has authored or co-authored more than 500 publications, books and submitted/granted patents and disclosures. He has led or contributed to many international projects.
Prof. Dahiya is President of IEEE Sensors Council. He has been recipient of EPSRC Fellowship, Marie Curie Fellowship and Japanese Monbusho Fellowship. He was the Founding Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal on Flexible Electronics (J-FLEX) and has been editorial boards of several leading journals. He has been General Chair or Technical Programme Chair of several international conferences. He has received several awards, including Technical Achievement award from IEEE Sensors Council, Young Investigator Award from Elsevier, and 12 best journal/conference paper awards as author/co-author. He is Fellow of IEEE and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Web: www.rsdahiya.com.
Josiah Hester holds the Allchin Chair and is Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Josiah was previously at Northwestern as an Assistant Professor. He works towards a sustainable future for computing informed by his Native Hawaiian heritage. His research is in intermittent computing and battery-free embedded computing systems, applied to health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for sustainability and conservation. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022, and was named to Popular Science’s Brilliant Ten in 2021.
Bashima Islam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institue (WPI). She directs the Bringing Awareness through Systems for Humans Lab (BASH Lab), which focuses on understanding and enhancing the usability, intelligence, and processing capabilities of tiny low-power edge devices to realize their full potential in our daily lives. She aims to develop a new set of intelligent edge computers that provide sustainable and scalable sensing solutions in various application domains ranging from health wearable to precision agriculture. The interdisciplinary nature of her research involves diverse domains, including Machine Learning, Mobile Computing, Embedded Systems, and Ubiquitous Computing. Her work has been published in top conferences, including SenSys, IMWUT/UBICOMP, IPSN, RTAS, MobiSys, EMSoft, EuroSys, and ICAASP. In recognition of her work on time-aware intermittent systems, she was the finalist of the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at UbiComp 2020, and was one of the Rising Stars in EECS, 2020. She also received the N2Women Young Researcher Fellowship in 2017. Forbes named her as one of the 30 most influential scientists under the age of 30 in 2021. Bashima received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in 2021 and has spent a year as a Visiting Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC).