International Summer School on ICT for Sustainability

2021 webpage can be found here.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a central role to play in digitalization and the transition to a sustainable society. ICT offers us a rich set of tools to collect and analyze diverse sources of data that helps us develop and share new solutions, and increasingly, ICT provides new low-energy alternatives to physically moving people and goods around the planet. At the same time, ICT can erode democratic governance, reinforce inequality and exploitation, increase energy consumption, and seduce us into patterns of over-consumption and waste as we buy and discard an ever-growing set of gadgets. While ICT can help reduce energy consumption through effects such as dematerialisation, at the same it generates new demands for energy consumption, for example for bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence. The complexities of these interactions between ICT, society and the economy must be disentangled in order to support the growing commitment to address negative impacts on the environment and society.

Since its inception in 2013, the ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S) research community has coalesced around a common set of research challenges that address this dilemma, focusing both on how to make ICT greener, and how to leverage the power of ICT to develop sustainable solutions in diverse areas such as urban futures, transport, buildings, food, electricity, clean water, and the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs).

The ICT4S Summer School 2020 will build a bridge between related communities, kickstart new scientific collaborations and nurture the next generation of community members through a series of presentations by leading academics as well as collaborative paper writing workshops.