Twinning the green & digital transitions (BSc / MSc)

Short description

IT is responsible for about 2-4 % of global greenhouse gas emissions and that keeps growing due to new technologies like big data and AI. At WUR we deploy traditional and state-of-the-art IT that supports research into opportunities to make the world greener (SDG-s). That has made WUR the most sustainable university in the world, according to the UI GreenMatric ranking. At the same time, WUR is also an extremely well example of the twin challenge: the direct negative impact of IT must be outweighed by the positive effect on greening the world.

Objectives

This project is a collaboration with organizational units of WUR itself like our science groups and the supporting IT unit. And it will contribute to embed sustainability in the processes of WUR using a life cycle approach that measures, proposes and improves. The following key points are of interest and can be addressed as a whole or in parts:

1. Measuring the carbon footprint of IT: Holistic approach on giving insight into the direct negative effect of IT by setting up a measuring system that encompasses all components of an information system, such as the software, hardware, data generation, data analyses and storage, ranging from traditional systems to state-of-art AI/ML.
2. Design a model that shows the net effect: the challenge of this model is comparing the measured direct negative effect in IT with the positive effect of digitalization by the science groups on a sustainable world.
3. Compare the GHG emissions of manual and digitized research.
4. Analyse the IT/data footprint of a research project during which a lot of data is generated, applied and stored and give advice on minimizing the greenhouse emission of the data during and after the research.
5. Give recommendations to WUR: questions WUR has is how we can produce, use and store data in a sufficient way and how can we architecture, design, develop and deploy applications as sufficient as possible. In addition, what is needed to make researchers/staff/students aware of the sustainability aspects of IT use and what behavioral changes are needed.

Tasks

The work in this study can entail the following, depending on the subject.

• Investigate current research on sustainable IT by literature study and visit of organizations and experts that have made sustainable IT part of their practice.
• Apply knowledge from an area like Information Systems or Research Data Management and create an ecological footprint viewpoint.
• Defining the differences of digital versus manual applied research in terms of use gas emissions
• Apply knowledge of model engineering.
• Investigate social behavior and awareness around a mindset to apply IT in a sufficient way.

Literature

• European Commission. Twinning the green and digital transitions in the new geopolitical context. 2022.
• Lorenz M. Hilty, Magda D. Hercheui: ICT and Sustainable Development. In: What Kind of Information Society? Governance, Virtuality, Surveillance, Sustainability, Resilience. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 2010.
• Various sources on Digital Sufficiency. See links on  https://www.ioew.de/en/project/digitalization_and_social_ecological_transformation e.g. Digital sufficiency: conceptual considerations for ICTs on a finite planet, 2022.

Requirements

• Courses: Depending on the subject e.g. Information Systems, Software development, Cloud/Datacenters, Data Science Concepts (INF-34306), Big Data (INF-33806) or Machine Learning (FTE-35306)
• Required skills/knowledge: IT knowledge like software development, data analytics/machine learning and hosting infrastructures like data center and cloud.

Key words: Information Systems, Research Data Management, Artificial Intelligence, Sustainable Digitalization

Contact person(s)

Gert Faber, Enterprise Architect (gert.faber@wur.nl)

Eri van Heijnsbergen, coordinating data steward Plant Science group (eri.vanheijnsbergen@wur.nl)