Talks

As software is (h)eating the world, sustainability is becoming an increasingly critical issue under study and consideration within software engineering. However, the majority of efforts are concentrated on environmental and technical dimensions. So, what about social sustainability? At a time when the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mandates businesses to report not just financial information but also sustainability data, comprehending the impacts of software on sustainability and its role in achieving greater sustainability has become exceedingly urgent and essential. Presently, research concerning social sustainability remains limited, and offering a comprehensive perspective on sustainability or a method of assessment for software practitioners or users remains a distant dream.Therefore, as a researcher with a background in environmental sustainability, I am interested in exploring the social dimension of sustainability, bridging the gap with the environmental dimension, and simultaneously evaluating the interplay between the two. Following a very brief introduction of my research background in sustainability, I will delve into the (lack of common) definition of social sustainability, provide a quick overview of the existing literature in this field, and propose potential directions for further investigation. My goal is to stimulate discussions on this subject and to receive insights regarding such a developing field.

Artificial intelligence is bringing ever new function- alities to the realm of mobile devices that are now considered essential (e.g., camera and voice assistants, recommender sys- tems). Yet, operating artificial intelligence takes up a substantial amount of energy. However, artificial intelligence is also being used to enable more energy-efficient solutions for mobile systems. Hence, artificial intelligence has two faces in that regard, it is both a key enabler of desired (efficient) mobile functionalities and a major power draw on these devices, playing a part in both the solution and the problem. In this paper, we present a review of the literature of the past decade on the usage of artificial intelligence within the realm of green mobile computing. From the analysis of 34 papers, we highlight the emerging patterns and map the field into 13 main topics that are summarized in details. Our results showcase that the field is slowly increasing in the past years, more specifically, since 2019. Regarding the double impact AI has on the mobile energy consumption, the energy consumption of AI-based mobile systems is under-studied in comparison to the usage of AI for energy-efficient mobile computing, and we argue for more exploratory studies in that direction. We observe that although most studies are framed as solution papers (94%), the large majority do not make those solutions publicly available to the community. Moreover, we also show that most contributions are purely academic (28 out of 34 papers) and that we need to promote the involvement of the mobile software industry in this field.