Beyond data in the smart city:learning from a case study of re-purposing existing campus IoT

In this article we present a case study of our experiences of using existing IoT infrastructure to create a campus scale “living laboratory” for promoting energy savings and environmental sustainability. As a series of lessons for others creating IoT systems from existing city infrastructures we offer the challenges we have experienced through our attempt to join up and re-purpose existing energy monitoring and building management systems as an IoT infrastructure for a “smart campus”. We highlight the limitations of particular views of a campus from a purely data-driven perspective, advocating data- aware over data-driven approaches that engage with a wide variety of stakeholders. Finally, we reflect on the inclusion of people’s practices in understanding and designing smart cities, repurposing existing IoT, more careful consideration of ethics and domestication when co-creating smart campuses and the importance of challenging the existing rhetoric around energy waste in Smart Cities and Smart buildings research

Supporting sustainable food shopping

Food contributes a surprisingly large portion of personal greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Could pervasive technologies help influence diet choices to reduce this? The authors offer insights for designers of pervasive technologies addressing food and the GHG impacts of diet

Are people the key to enabling collaborative smart logistics?

The number of parcels delivered is growing annually, with a 15.7% increase to 1 billion parcel deliveries in the UK in 2015. We introduce Freight Traffic Control 2050 which is exploring how to transform last-mile urban freight through “collaborative logistics”. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork, we introduce the context and challenges in this domain. We highlight the value of experience and tacit knowledge, and the importance of approaching this domain from a socio-technical perspective. We offer a selection of early challenges identified as a starting point for discussion within the HCI community

Are there limits to growth in data traffic?:on time use, data generation and speed

This discussion paper considers the nature of growth in data traffic across the Internet, as a basis for asking whether and how such growth might slow down or otherwise be limited. Over the last decade, data growth has been dramatic, and forecasts predict a similar ongoing pattern. Since this is associated with increasing electricity consumption, such a trend is significant to global efforts to reduce carbon emis- sions. In this paper, we selectively explore aspects of data growth that are linked to everyday practices and the way they draw upon and generate Internet data. We suggest that such growth does have some conceivable limits. However, the nature of ‘Internet use’ is changing and forms of growth are emerging that are more disconnected from human ac- tivity and time-use. This suggests that although there may well be limits, in principle, to some forms of growth, total data traffic seems likely to continue growing. This calls for careful attention to the nature of the trends involved, as a basis for intentionally building limits into this system be- fore levels of Internet electricity demand becomes directly and more explicitly problematic

‘Doing good science’:The impact of invisible energy policies on laboratory energy demand in higher education

Education is the second largest consumer of energy in the service sector, however, little research to date has focused on the link between education policy and energy demand. Using a case study, this paper explores the role of invisible energy policies in Higher Education (HE). We make a distinctive contribution to debates about invisible energy policy by applying concepts from governmentality to show how different policies and technologies of governance come in to conflict in practice. And, we argue that although there are a number of institutional and national-level policies directly related to sustainability (including energy) there are also a number of conflicting priorities, most notably linked to the neoliberalisation of HE. Our case study focuses on teaching and research laboratories and empirically explores the impacts of both intentional and non-intentional energy policy in these spaces. Specifically this research highlights that the ability to ‘do good science’ has implications for demand management that go beyond research and teaching laboratory activities, and into the wider realm of HE institutions and policies

Better off:when should pervasive displays be powered down?

Digital displays are a ubiquitous feature of our public spaces - both ever present, and "always on". In this paper we use a combination of literature survey, experimental work, and stakeholder interviews to consider if maximising the amount of time such displays are powered on is truly advantageous. We challenge existing practice by considering arguments from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders (viewers, passers-by, content creators and signage owners), and identify multiple facets for consideration including levels of attention, cognitive load, impact on social interactions, energy and financial costs, advertising revenue, perceptions of failure and the pressures of creating valuable content

Streaming, Multi-Screens and YouTube:The New (Unsustainable) Ways of Watching in the Home

Internet use and online services underpin everyday life, and the resultant energy demand is almost entirely hidden, yet significant and growing: it is anticipated to reach 21% of global electricity demand by 2030 and to eclipse half the greenhouse gas emissions of transportation by 2040. Driving this growth, real-time video streaming (‘watching’) is estimated at around 50% of all peak data traffic. Using a mixed-methods analysis of the use of 66 devices (e.g. smart TVs, tablets) across 20 participants in 9 households, we reveal the online activity of domestic watching and provide a detailed exploration of video-on-demand activities. We identify new ways in which watching is transitioning in more rather than less data demanding directions; and explore the role HCI may play in reducing this growing data demand. We further highlight implications for key HCI and societal stakeholders (policy makers, service providers, network engineers) to tackle this important issue

ICT for Sustainable Last-Mile Logistics:Data, People and Parcels

In this paper we present a vision of how ICT can be leveraged to help combat the impact on pollution, congestion and carbon emissions contributed by the parcel delivery sector. This is timely given annual growth in parcel deliveries, especially same-day deliveries, and the need to inform initiatives to clean up our cities such as the sales ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK by 2040. Our insights are informed by research on parcel logistics in Central London, leveraging a data set of parcel manifests spanning 6 months. To understand the impact of growing e-commerce trends on parcel deliveries we provide a mixed methods case study leveraging data-driven analysis and qualitative fieldwork to demonstrate how ICT can uncover the impact of parcel deliveries on delivery drivers and their delivery rounds during seasonal deliveries (or “the silly season”). We finish by discussing key opportunities for intervention and further research in ICT4S and co-created Smart Cities, connecting our findings with existing research and data as a call to the ICT4S community to help tackle the growth in carbon emissions, pollution and congestion linked to parcel deliveries

Multidifferential study of identified charged hadron distributions in ZZ-tagged jets in proton-proton collisions at s=\sqrt{s}=13 TeV

Jet fragmentation functions are measured for the first time in proton-proton collisions for charged pions, kaons, and protons within jets recoiling against a $Z$ boson. The charged-hadron distributions are studied longitudinally and transversely to the jet direction for jets with transverse momentum 20 $< p_{\textrm{T}} < 100$ GeV and in the pseudorapidity range $2.5 < \eta < 4$. The data sample was collected with the LHCb experiment at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.64 fb$^{-1}$. Triple differential distributions as a function of the hadron longitudinal momentum fraction, hadron transverse momentum, and jet transverse momentum are also measured for the first time. This helps constrain transverse-momentum-dependent fragmentation functions. Differences in the shapes and magnitudes of the measured distributions for the different hadron species provide insights into the hadronization process for jets predominantly initiated by light quarks.Comment: All figures and tables, along with machine-readable versions and any supplementary material and additional information, are available at https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-013.html (LHCb public pages