The environmental impact of transcontinental data traffic

Submarine cables carry over 97 percent of transcontinental voice and data traffic. The high capacity and bandwidth of fibre optic cables make it possible to transfer large amounts of data around the globe almost instantaneously. A new study by Craig Donovan takes a look at the environmental impact of submarine cables from a life cycle perspective.

Mobile Applications for Sustainable Food Consumption

David Kjelkerud, student within the project Persuasive services, has finished his thesis “Lost in the Supermarket – Mobile Applications for Sustainable Food Consumption”.

Video from World Usability Day seminar

At World Usability Day 2009, Jorge Zapico presented highlights from his research on carbon literacy. The seminar discusses different techniques and applications that help to make carbon dioxide information usable and understandable.

World Usability Day 2009

The Centre for Sustainable Communications contributes to World Usability Day 2009 with a seminar presenting current research. Welcome to “A low-carbon lifestyle through ICT” on November 12 at KTH. Jorge Zapico and Åsa Moberg discuss different examples of how ICT can be used to save the environment and combat climate change.

Greening newspaper companies through ICT?

What environmental gains can be achieved through the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) at a newspaper company? A current project at the Centre for Sustainable Communications seeks an answer to this question. Åsa Moberg and her colleagues investigate alternatives to business travel and commuting. The research team also takes a look at computer habits of employees. At a first workshop employees at the four participating companies discussed the possibilities for distance meetings. Another workshop will focus on alternative ways of meeting through ICT. The environmental potential will be estimated for different solutions at each company. The project will be presented at a seminar at KTH on October 2.

Comparing CO2-emissions at a blink

A team from the Centre for Sustainable Communications participated in EcoMo09, a 24-hour competition in writing green code. The team contributed with an API for comparing CO2 emissions from different sources called Carbon.to.

Five new Centre partners in stage 2

The Centre for Sustainable Communications starts into a new contract period with 13 partners. The contract period for stage 2 lasts until June 2012 and was approved by the General meeting of partners on September 10, 2009. The new partners joining the Centre in stage 2 are following: the Swedish media company Stampen, the public service company Sveriges Television, the Institute for Future Studies, the City of Stockholm and the Office of Regional Planning at the Stockholm County Council (Regionplanekontoret).

This is our new website!

Our new website is still under development. Currently we are busy migrating content from our old website and updating information. Feel free to comment the ongoing work!

Energy conservation workshop at Pervasive 2010

Marko Turpeinen, project leader for the Centre project Persuasive Services, is co-organising the workshop Energy Awareness and Conservation through Pervasive Applications at The Eighth International Conference on Pervasive Computing Pervasive 2010 in Helsinki to be held May 17-20, 2010.

The workshop will cover following topics:

• Pervasive sensing of energy consumption. How to analyze detailed electrical devices data but also connecting it to people’s actions? How to model the domain to inform the design of software and analysis of data?
• Energy efficient infrastructures for sensing energy and users. The energy efficient design of such application is key to ensure the feasibility of conservation projects. The problem is how to sense, communicate , and compute in this area in an energy efficient way?
• Pervasive interfaces including natural/ambient and mobile applications. What interface technologies and platform best deliver energy awareness applications?
• Informed design of

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The New York Times: Skip the Newspaper, Save the Planet?

The New York Times refers to a publication by the Centre for Sustainable Communications in an article about online news versus print. Read Skip the Newspaper, Save the Planet? (Tom Zeller, The New York Times, April 19, 2009).