First Monday

Introduction to LIMITS '15: First workshop on computing within limits

Daniel Pargman — 2015-07-31

This special issue brings together papers from Limits 2015, the first workshop on computing withn limits, held 15-16 June 2015 at the University of California, Irvine.

Information systems for the age of consequences

M. Six Silberman — 2015-07-31

This paper discusses what kinds of computer information systems might be of broad social value in the context of the increasingly severe ecological and social consequences of economic growth, and how they might be built and maintained. The paper has two parts. The first offers a particular understanding of the ecological and social “limits” to economic growth. The second considers how this understanding can inform computer information systems design and operation and characterizes good “limits-aware” computing research.

Deviant and guilt-ridden: Computing within psychological limits

Bran Knowles — 2015-07-31

In this position paper we discuss a set of problems particular to computing within limits that draws on psychological and sociological barriers. The enormity of the predicaments we are facing, global climate change and resource scarcity, together with the social, cultural and national settings in which we are facing these predicaments, are seriously hampering our possibility to address them. We argue that without confronting the underlying psychology that perpetuates our current state of un-sustainability, there is little computing can hope to achieve. Furthermore, we also argue that these psychological limits to computing do not only concern the users of our systems, often portrayed as the people in need of behavioral change, but also ourselves, as researchers within computing. In this paper we start exploring what these psychological limits could be, what ideas computing for sustainability has tried but should now retire, and start discussing a way forward.

Computing within limits and ICTD

Jay Chen — 2015-07-31

Computing research today is fixated on high performance and large scale, but computing can be tremendously powerful even at low power and small scale. In this article we present a perspective on promising directions for research on computing within limits, where concerns about limits overshadow performance and scale. Despite coming from different motivations, computing within limits has very similar considerations as Information Communication Technology for Development (ICTD). We discuss where the two research areas intersect and where they may diverge. We draw parallels between computing within limits and ICTD in terms of technical constraints, designing for context, and goals. We hope to help stimulate computing within limits with ideas from ICTD and highlight research synergies.

Limits and sustainable interaction design: Obsolescence in a future of collapse and resource scarcity

Christian Remy — 2015-07-31

Electronic waste, caused by the advancements of technology and its rapidly increasing obsolescence, represents a major threat to environmental sustainability. Research in sustainable HCI has proposed a variety of solutions to tackle this issue, but has yet to create a major impact in product design. While currently industry’s goals are opposed to research’s concepts of addressing obsolescence, a future of collapse and resource scarcity requires a revisit of those contributions: changes in society at large, such as a decrease of resource availability, different needs, requirements, and desires of the consumer, but also new directions of industry and marketing might enable researchers to bring their old concepts into practice. We take a look at a variety of obsolescence-related research in sustainable HCI and foreshadow its potential for such a future of collapse and resource scarcity.

Abstraction, indirection, and Sevareid's Law: Towards benign computing

Barath Raghavan — 2015-07-31

Computing is one of the primary means by which we solve problems in society today. In this short paper we examine the implications of the primary techniques used in computer systems work — abstraction and indirection — and of Sevareid’s Law, an epigram that suggests that our problem-solving instinct may be leading us astray. We explore the context of this dilemma and discuss instances in which this has arisen in the recent past. We then consider a few design options and changes to the normal mode of computer science practice that might enable us to sidestep the implications of Sevareid’s Law.

Foster the "mores", counter the "limits"

Xinning Gui — 2015-07-31

This paper reports an ethnographic study of an environmental volunteer organization in Mincheng, China and the Transition Town movement in Totnes, U.K. We examine limits that affected local sustainable activities, and how people attempted to counter the limits. Our use of the term “limits” is a little different than “limits on computing” but pertinent to the larger issues.

Collapse (and other futures) software engineering

Birgit Penzenstadler — 2015-07-31

Current software engineering efforts typically rely heavily on industrial infrastructure. In a situation of civilizational collapse — which various researchers have suggested could ensue in the next century via an assortment of environmental, economic, and/or social pathways — this infrastructure may become less reliable. Previous research has offered some thoughts about what new forms of software may be relevant in the context of collapse. However, those papers did not consider how these new kinds of software would arise. Building on previous work in software engineering for sustainability (SE4S), information and communications technology for development (ICT4D), and collapse informatics, this paper explores how various forms of civilizational collapse would affect the software development process.

Understanding limits from a social ecological perspective

Teresa Cerratto Pargman — 2015-07-31

The latest developments in the field of HCI have given rise to an increasing interest in issues pertaining to global warming, resource depletion and environmental degradation. Concern about such issues has contributed to give shape to the design space of sustainable HCI (SHCI); a space whose boundaries are at times blurred. On the one hand, some, design “sustainable” information technology based on visions of the world that do not really question limits to continuous economic growth and, on the other hand, others embrace the design of information technology from stances that acknowledges limits (i.e., economic, ecological, energetic). This paper introduces the perspective of social ecology into SHCI. This perspective provides us with a core set of principles that makes us situate computing at the intersection of physical (natural) and moral (human) qualities of our human environment systems. As such it confronts us with choices to be made in the challenging years to come and invites us to argue about the very purpose of information technology in a world of limitations.

Inequality and limits

Bonnie Nardi — 2015-07-31

Many indicators demonstrate growing economic inequality. Figure 1 depicts increasing economic disparity between social classes. Despite increased productivity, waged workers are losing ground because owners of capital are accumulating the wealth generated by increased productivity (Figure 2). Since wealth accumulation is the goal of capitalism, this is not surprising. Many forms of digitally mediated labor are not even waged any more, though they generate economic value. Digitally mediated labor includes casual labor managed in short-term contracts in systems such as Mechanical Turk, the uncompensated labor of self-service, and uncompensated “affective” labor. Because technology supports a global labor force, traditional mechanisms of ensuring fairness, such as labor unions, are not always operative. This paper considers the problem of the distribution of wealth, and suggests sociotechnical mechanisms for a world with fewer traditional jobs.

Preliminary thoughts on a taxonomy of value for sustainable computing

Kentaro Toyama — 2015-07-31

In anticipation of the various and imminent limits to global consumption-based growth, some quarters of the technology industry have begun to consider the novel use of computing to prevent, postpone, alleviate, or recover from a crisis in what could be called “sustainable computing.” There is, however, a great danger that certain inclinations of the technology sector will undermine the very goals of sustainability and resilience that such efforts claim to seek.

This paper outlines a preliminary taxonomy of value for sustainable computing projects. The taxonomy suggests a three-dimensional classification of projects in terms of their impact on, intention toward, and effort required for sustainability. By making explicit an evaluative framework by which computing might and might not contribute to sustainability goals, the hope is that future work will tend toward projects that are genuinely helpful.

Cacophony: Building a resilient Internet of things

John Brock — 2015-07-31

The proliferation of sensors in the world has created increased opportunities for context-aware applications. However, it is often cumbersome to capitalize on these opportunities due to the difficulties inherent in collecting, fusing, and reasoning with data from a heterogeneous set of distributed sensors. The fabric that connects sensors lacks resilience and fault tolerance in the face of infrastructure intermittency. To address these difficulties, we introduce Cacophony, a network of peer-to-peer nodes (CNodes), where each node provides real-time predictions of a specified set of sensor data. The predictions from each of the Cacophony prediction nodes can be used by any application with access to the Web. Creating a new CNode involves three steps: (1) Developers and domain-knowledge experts, via a simple Web UI, specify which sensor data they care about. Possible sources of sensor data include stationary sensors, mobile sensors, and the real-time Web; (2) The CNode automatically aggregates data from the relevant sensors in real time using a JXTA-based peer-to-peer network; and, (3) The CNode uses the aggregated data to train a prediction model via the Weka machine-learning library (Hall, et al., 2009). Real-time predictions made by the CNode are then made publicly available to applications that wish to use data from a CNode’s particular set of sensors. The real-time predictions themselves can also be used recursively as sensor data, enabling the creation of CNodes that make predictions based on other CNodes.

Haitian resiliency: A case study in intermittent infrastructure

Donald J. Patterson — 2015-07-31

In 2010 Haiti experienced a catastrophic earthquake that destroyed a substantial amount of infrastructure in the capital of Port-au-Prince. Limited national resources and widespread poverty have made the rebuilding slow and piecemeal. Five years later that infrastructure is still unevenly repaired and maintained. Nevertheless, the Haitian people have, by necessity, continued to adapt in order to take care of day-to-day activities. Based on a field visit, this paper describes some of the ways that infrastructure has re-emerged, gives examples of how people deal with the alternate infrastructures, how the infrastructures structure their lives and discusses what these lessons entail for how the developed world frames infrastructure in the face of similar challenges caused by global energy shortages.

Toward a computational immigration assistant

Bill Tomlinson — 2015-07-31

In the face of global change and impending limits on various resources, the need for people to move across borders is likely to increase. Facilitating mobility could enable people to access resources more effectively, and thereby reduce suffering for both humans and other species. This paper proposes the need for computational support to facilitate immigration decisions across a range of scales, from the individual to the community to the national government. Drawing inspiration from global systems modeling, social networking, and collaborative filtering, these computational tools would help match up individuals and communities seeking to emigrate with potential host countries, based on the preferences of both.

On the limits of limits

Daniel Pargman — 2015-07-31

This discussion paper outlines the connection between the perceived urgency of environmental and resource challenges that humanity is facing during the twenty-first century and the individual researcher’s response within the emerging “Computing within Limits” community. What is the relationship between our beliefs as individuals and as researchers and the specific issues we chose to study? Furthermore, is there a relationship between skills and topics we happen to be expert in and the subsequent future scenarios we plan for and deem to be more likely to happen?