Schedule

The lecture series is held in the winter semester 2026/2027, every Monday from 17:00–18:00. All lectures are offered online and will be recorded.

The Zoom link for all lectures is:

• tuwien.zoom.us/j/63867281732
• Meeting ID: 638 6728 1732
• Passcode: Xnupv5gi

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

Green HPC: Paving the Way for Sustainable Supercomputing

By Philipp Gschwandtner, University of Innsbruck on Oct 5, 2026.

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.

Seeing the Unseen: Unlocking Occluded Ecosystems from Above

By Oliver Bimber, JKU Linz on Oct 12, 2026.

Over the past decade, we have focused on developing novel aerial imaging technologies designed to mitigate the challenges of vegetation occlusion in complex ecosystem environments. By integrating advanced signal processing with machine learning, our methods aims to reveal targets and patterns that are otherwise obscured by dense forest canopies or heavy agricultural foliage. The resulting technology has been adapted to a variety of operational platforms, spanning unmanned drones, manned aircraft, and ground-based robotic systems. This talk will present a comprehensive summary of the technical achievements and milestones reached throughout this long-term research initiative. It will examine how drones are applied across distinct fields, such as wildlife conservation, forest ecology, and precision agriculture.

Introduction to Computational Sustainability

By Ivona Brandic, TU Wien on Oct 19, 2026.

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 the 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 to develop a more sustainable world including sustainable watershed management through IoT-driven artificial intelligence and satellite-based monitoring of livestock in the Alpine region.

Blockchains and Sustainability

By Krzysztof Pietrzak, ISTA on Nov 9, 2026.

The Bitcoin cryptocurrency, through the underlying blockchain technology, for the first time achieved consensus in a permissionless setting, that is, in a distributed way where everyone can participate towards securing the system. To achieve this, the key idea is to “vote” using computing power, rather than identities. The blockchain technology is interesting from a sustainability perspective as it poses unique challenges, but also promises to address existing issues, for example through DePIN projects, which aim to build and operate real-world physical infrastructure (like wireless networks, sensor grids, compute/storage networks, energy systems, etc.) in a decentralized, open, and permissionless way. In this lecture, I’ll discuss a cryptographic primitive, proofs of space, and show how a project (Chia) uses them to address the main challenge, namely the massive electricity waste of the Bitcoin blockchain. At the same time, proofs of space are the key enabler of a DePIN project (Filecoin) constructing a decentralized storage network.

Sustainability in Software Engineering

By Franz Wotawa, TU Graz on Nov 16, 2026.

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. Afterwards, we outline the application of sustainability to software.

Artificial Intelligence and Optimization for Sustainable Applications

By Nysret Musliu, TU Wien on Nov 23, 2026.

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

Space-efficient Blockchains

By Georg Fuchsbauer, TU Wien on Nov 30, 2026.

The move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus 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. This data currently amounts to over 700 GB in Bitcoin and over 1.7 TB in Ethereum. We will overview two approaches to space-efficient systems. Mimblewimble supports erasing spent transactions from the blockchain while maintaining verifiability. Mina uses a cryptographic concept called recursive zk-SNARK to reduce its blockchain size to 22kB, which will never grow.

Sustainable Security

By Daniel Gruss, TU Graz on Dec 7, 2026.

Global ICT electricity consumption already exceeds 11 percent of worldwide electricity production and continues to increase. By 2030, it may reach around 25 percent. Previous approaches to improving efficiency and performance have often sacrificed security, leading to disastrous security issues such as Meltdown and Spectre. Patching just these two vulnerabilities increases power consumption on affected computers by a seemingly harmless 5 percent. By 2030, this could amount to more than 1 percent of global electricity production for just a single mitigation among thousands. This development is not sustainable. In this talk, we will discuss both the problem and potential solutions that can even use security to increase efficiency.

Emerging Computing Paradigms for a Sustainable Next-Generation Computing Landscape

By Stefan Nastic, TU Wien on Dec 14, 2026.

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.

Sustainability in the Post-Moore Era: Challenges and Opportunities

By Vincenzo De Maio, University of Leicester & TU Wien on Jan 11, 2027.

The rapid growth of AI, cloud computing, and HPC is forcing computational scientists to confront the environmental impact of modern digital infrastructures. Quantum computing is often advertised as a possible way to address the increasing demand of modern computational infrastructures, but how should quantum computing be positioned within this broader sustainability challenge? This lecture discusses the role of quantum computing in sustainable computing. We review current expectations regarding quantum advantages for optimization, simulation, and scientific discovery, while critically examining their potential impact on energy consumption and computational efficiency. We then explore emerging perspectives from quantum information science, particularly the view that information itself is a physical resource whose manipulation carries unavoidable costs.By connecting quantum computing, high-performance computing, and sustainability, the talk aims to provide a systems-oriented perspective on one of the most important challenges facing future computing infrastructures.

Carbon Footprint of Social Media (And other Popular Platforms)

By Andreas Uhl, PLUS on Jan 18, 2027.

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 how these estimations have been obtained, partially revealing that the perspective from which such investigations are being conducted is significantly biasing the results.

Sustainable Computing through Decentralization

By Atakan Aral, University of Vienna on Jan 25, 2027.

The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence is concentrating energy demand in large data centers and specific geographic regions, placing increasing pressure on power grids, cooling infrastructure, and local resources. This lecture explores the decentralization of computation across the cloud-edge continuum. It will discuss how edge computing and Edge AI can contribute to more sustainable digital infrastructures, particularly when combined with adaptive orchestration, distributed training, and communication-efficient learning. It will also examine neuromorphic computing as a promising approach for ultra-low-power, event-driven processing at the edge, enabling continuous sensing and intelligent decision-making under strict energy constraints.

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