The lecture series will be held in the winter semester 2024/2025, every Monday from 17:00-18:00. All lectures will be offered online and will be recorded. We also have one hybrid lecture which will be held on-site at TU Wien and online on November 4, 2024.

Registration

Whether you’re a student, a professional looking to expand your knowledge, or a citizen interested in sustainability issues – this lecture series is open to anyone. Switch on your laptop and join us!

Students from participating universities can register to get credits for the lecture series. Please refer to your respective institution for registration.

TU Wien students can register for VU 194.155 “Sustainability in Computer Science” via TISS. Depending on your study program, the lecture series is a free elective or a “Wahlpflichtfach”; please refer to TISS for further information.

Upcoming Lectures

Sustainable Blockchains

By Krzysztof Pietrzak, ISTA on Nov 25, 2024.

The Bitcoin blockchain achieves consensus in an open setting, i.e., where everyone can participate. This was believed to be impossible, the key idea to make this possible was to use computing power rather than some kind of identities for voting through “proofs of work”. Unfortunately, this approach is not sustainable: the Bitcoin blockchain burns roughly as much electricity as a country like Austria. We will outline sustainable alternatives for achieving a Bitcoin-like blockchain, with a focus on using disk space instead of computation and how this is realized in the Chia Network blockchain.

Protecting Software Against Man-At-The-End Attacks: The Efficiency Challenge

By Sebastian Schrittwieser, University of Vienna on Dec 2, 2024.

In today’s world, software is ubiquitous and deeply integrated into many aspects of our lives, including critical industries. This widespread use of software creates a need for effective security measures, especially in scenarios where software is directly exposed to potential attackers. In a so-called Man-At-The-End (MATE) attack scenario, an attacker has physical access to a device and therefore complete control over the software it runs. Maintaining the integrity of software - ensuring that it works as intended without unauthorised changes - and protecting the confidentiality of the assets it contains is therefore an essential foundation for trustworthy IT systems. Over the past 30 years, many software protection techniques have been introduced, all aimed at making MATE attacks more difficult. These can be classified as code obfuscation (protection against analysis), software tamper-proofing (protection against modification), and watermarking and fingerprinting (to mark instances of the software).

However, these security measures come at a cost. They tend to increase the size of software and significantly reduce its run-time efficiency by consuming more processing power and memory, leading to a trade-off between protection and efficiency. Finding the right balance is crucial, but challenging as no well-defined level of security for software protection exists. This is partly due to the fact that attackers are human, and therefore hard-to-measure characteristics such as motivation, creativity, and persistence play an important role in the success of code analysis attacks. The newly established Christian Doppler Laboratory for Assurance and Transparency in Software Protection borrows methods from complexity science and involves human reverse engineers to explore the quantifiability of the strength of software protection methodologies. This lecture gives an introduction to the core concepts of software protection, current research challenges towards quantifying the strength of protections, and how code efficiency of protected software can be optimised in the future.

Emerging Computing Paradigms for a Sustainable Next-Generation Computing Landscape

By Stefan Nastic, TU Wien on Dec 9, 2024.

We are witnessing a transformative evolution of computing landscapes, giving rise to what is known as a 3D continuum. The 3D computing continuum refers to an integrated, interconnected system of computing resources and services that operate across multiple tiers, including Cloud, Fog, Edge, IoT, and recently, space-based systems such as satellites. These tiers work together, enabling data processing, storage, and computation to occur seamlessly and concurrently across different levels optimizing performance, latency, and resource usage. The modern 3D computing continuum is increasingly defined by high resource consumption, rising energy demands, a growing carbon footprint and the potential for significant environmental and economic impacts. Serverless computing has established itself as a compelling paradigm for developing modern and sustainable continuum-native applications. It represents the next step in the evolution of edge and cloud computing paradigms and introduces novel programming models, execution models, services, and platforms. Serverless computing paradigm is especially appealing due to its low management overhead, easy deployment, scale-to-zero, and the promise of optimized costs. In this talk, we take a closer look at the state of serverless computing, particularly focusing on the opportunities and challenges related to building sustainable serverless applications and systems in the 3D continuum.

Electric Load Disaggregation as a Means for Increasing Energy Awareness and Reducing Energy Consumption

By Wilfried Elmenreich, University of Klagenfurt on Dec 16, 2024.

When the EU introduced smart meters, the idea was to give consumers more information about their power consumption, thus raising energy awareness. Tailored appliance-level feedback is expected to lead to more careful use of energy and thus to savings of around 12%. Despite the potential benefits, implementing a network of small measurement devices, each per appliance/socket has raised concerns due to the added energy consumption and intrusive visibility of smart adapters impacting user experience. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring employs computer algorithms to extract appliance consumption data from a single, smart meter measuring the entire system’s consumption. While this concept has been around since 1985, when George W. Hart (MIT) proposed it in a report for the Electric Power Research Institute, recent advancements in computer science have propelled its potential. This talk explores the significance of load disaggregation and its relevance in today’s context, where smart meters and small embedded devices like the Raspberry Pi offer sufficient computational resources. The presentation delves into the evolution of load disaggregation algorithms, from traditional bin-packing techniques and Hidden Markov Models to the cutting-edge application of deep neural networks powered by machine learning. As these techniques continue to evolve, the talk also addresses the pressing need to address privacy issues and develop comprehensive, long-term interfaces that engage consumers in a captivating manner to monitor their power consumption effectively. In conclusion, the talk highlights the potential of Electric Load Disaggregation in increasing energy awareness and reducing energy consumption. Leveraging advancements in computer science, this technology promises to substantially impact sustainable energy practices, empowering consumers to conserve energy and promote a greener future.

Green HPC - Paving the Way for Sustainable Supercomputing

By Philipp Gschwandtner, University of Innsbruck on Jan 13, 2025.

As the demand for high-performance computing continues to surge, the environmental impact of powering and cooling these massive computing infrastructures has become a pressing concern. This talk attempts to unravel the critical intersection of computational power and sustainability within the HPC domain, focusing on energy-efficient hardware, multi-objective optimization, and other relevant hardware and software practices.

Sustainability in Software Engineering

By Franz Wotawa, TU Graz on Jan 20, 2025.

In this talk, we are going to discuss the intersection of software engineering research and sustainability. We start with discussing existing approaches in software engineering for improving sustainability and, in particular, reducing the energy consumption of applications. Afterward, we outline the application of sustainability to software.

Space-efficient blockchains

By Georg Fuchsbauer, TU Wien on Jan 27, 2025.

The move from “proof of work” to “proof of stake” has arguably overcome the problem of energy waste in blockchains. However, for public verifiability, most systems require all transactions to be stored forever, by every full node. In Bitcoin this data now amounts to over 600GB, while in Ethereum it is over 1TB. We will overview two approaches to space-efficient systems. “Mimblewimble” is a protocol where spent transactions can be erased from the blockchain while maintaining verifiability. “Mina” goes further and, using a heavy-weight cryptographic concept called zk-SNARK, reduces its blockchain size to 22kB, which will never grow.

Recorded Lectures

Sustainable IoT and Edge AI for Remote Monitoring

By Atakan Aral, University of Vienna on Oct 7, 2024.

The combination of IoT devices and Edge AI unlocks new possibilities for sustainable remote monitoring of the natural environment as well as human-made infrastructure. This talk will explore the dual aspects of “remote” monitoring: (1) collecting data in geographically remote regions with limited energy and connectivity and (2) using connected IoT systems to gain real-time insights remotely. We can achieve efficient, energy-conscious monitoring solutions by deploying low-power or energy-harvesting sensors and processing data at the edge, close to where it is collected. The discussion will showcase applications ranging from environmental conservation efforts to ensuring the resilience of critical infrastructure, demonstrating the power of these technologies in addressing modern sustainability challenges.

Computer Science Between Energy Savings and Waste: From Videoconferencing to Blockchain

By René Mayrhofer, JKU Linz on Oct 14, 2024.

Digital information and communication services offer the potential for significant energy savings: video conferencing instead of trans-continental flight, file transfer and streaming instead of shipping physical media, or cryptocurrency instead of transporting gold and paper money. But what is the real energy balance of these digital options? In this talk, we try to quantify such comparisons based on estimates of the energy consumption of various digital services.

Sustainable Security

By Daniel Gruss, TU Graz on Oct 21, 2024.

Global ICT electricity consumption is already beyond 11 percent of the worldwide electricity production and still increasing. By 2030 it may reach around 25 percent. Previous approaches to improve efficiency and performance have often sacrificed security, leading to disastrous security issues like Meltdown and Spectre. Patching just these two vulnerabilities increases power consumption on affected computers by a seemingly harmless 5 percent. By 2030, this may be more than 1 percent of the global electricity production by just a single out of thousands of patches. This development is not sustainable, and in this talk, we will discuss both the problem and potential revolutionary solutions.

Carbon Footprint of Social Media (and other popular platforms)

By Andreas Uhl, PLUS on Oct 28, 2024.

With the increasing importance of sustainable solutions in ICT, social media platforms have been increasingly criticized for their significant carbon footprints. We will have a look at corresponding results and will analyze the methodology of how these estimations have been obtained, partially revealing that the perspective from which such investigations are being conducted is significantly biasing the results.

Sustainability Transformation and Responsibility

By Sigrid Stagl, WU Wien on Nov 4, 2024.

Sigrid Stagl is an economist at the department of socioeconomics of the WU Vienna and specializes in issues of sustainable labor, ecological macroeconomics, integrated valuation methods and socioeconomic theories of trade.

Artificial Intelligence and Optimization for Sustainable Applications

By Nysret Musliu , TU Wien on Nov 11, 2024.

Real-life problems in domains as diverse as health care, supply chain, production, and education are frequently very challenging, and their solutions impact the people involved as well as the resource consumption and efficiency of operations. Optimization and AI provide robust techniques that can be employed to effectively address such problems in a variety of sustainable applications. This lecture gives an overview of various AI and optimization techniques, including problem-solving and machine-learning techniques. Through case studies in scheduling and planning, as well as food waste reduction, we will demonstrate how these techniques can be applied to solve complex problems in sustainable applications.

Computational Sustainability: From Sustainable IT to the IT for the Sustainable World

By Ivona Brandic, TU Wien on Nov 18, 2024.

In the first part of this talk, we will discuss the concepts of sustainable IT. We will present novel approaches for sustainable fault tolerance and trustworthy geographically distributed AI applications utilized on systems ranging from the size of a smartphone to a warehouse-scale data center. Furthermore, we will discuss the novel concept of hybrid classic/quantum systems as a response to the increasing demand for computational resources. Scientific applications are nowadays utilizing different types of hardware accelerators, including GPUs, TPUs, and NPUs. With the arrival of the post Moore Era and the rise of quantum computing, we are experiencing new opportunities but also challenges when trying to integrate quantum computers into the well-known computational continuum. This integration into so-called hybrid systems promises resource efficiency at a new order of magnitude. We will discuss challenges regarding data encoding, noise, transpilation, and the high heterogeneity of quantum architectures, which necessitate the development and integration of additional hardware/software layers. In the second part of the talk, we will present several use cases where IT can be utilized to combat climate change and help us develop a more sustainable world, including sustainable watershed management through IoT-driven artificial intelligence and satellite-based monitoring of livestock in the Alpine region.

Slides

• Atakan Aral: Sustainable IoT and Edge AI for Remote Monitoring
  PDF / 5.38 MB / 2024-10-07-Slides-Atakan-Aral.pdf
• René Mayrhofer: Computer Science Between Energy Savings and Waste
  PDF / 2.71 MB / 2024-10-14-Slides-Rene-Mayrhofer.pdf
• Daniel Gruss: Sustainable Security
  PDF / 4.2 MB / 2024-10-21-Slides-Daniel-Gruss.pdf
• Andreas Uhl: Carbon Footprint of Social Media
  PDF / 2.28 MB / 2024-10-28-Slides-Andreas Uhl.pdf
• Sigrid Stagl: Planetary Constraints – The Boundaries of Our Economy?
  PDF / 8.35 MB / 2024-11-04-Slides-Sigrid-Stagl.pdf
• Nysret Musliu: AI and Optimization for Sustainable Applications
  PDF / 1.91 MB / 2024-11-11-Slides_Nysret_Musliu.pdf

Curious about past lectures of Sustainability in CS?

You can (re-)watch all lectures on our YouTube Channel.

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