Ankita Raturi

Systematic mapping study on software engineering for sustainability (SE4S)

Background/Context: The objective of achieving higher sustainability in our lifestyles by information and communication technology has lead to a plethora of research activities in related fields. Consequently, Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S) has developed as an active area of research. Objective/Aim: Though SE4S gained much attention over the past few years and has resulted in a number of contributions, there is only one rigorous survey of the field. We follow up on this systematic mapping study from 2012 with a more in-depth overview of the status of research, as most work has been conducted in the last 4 years. Method: The applied method is a systematic mapping study through which we investigate which contributions were made, which knowledge areas are most explored, and which research type facets have been used, to distill a common understanding of the state-of-the-art in SE4S. Results: We contribute an overview of current research topics and trends, and their distribution according to the research type facet and the application domains. Furthermore, we aggregate the topics into clusters and list proposed and used methods, frameworks, and tools. Conclusion: The research map shows that impact currently is limited to few knowledge areas and there is need for a future roadmap to fill the gaps.

Developing a sustainability non-functional requirements framework

Requirements engineers are in a unique position to encourage the consideration of sustainability at a formative phase in the software development life cycle. In this paper, we look at how we can develop sustainability as a non-functional requirement (NFR). We describe an NFR framework that is informed by sustainability models and discuss how it can be used to appropriately elicit and describe sustainability related requirements of the software system to be developed. We outline a roadmap for how we may integrate sustain- ability in requirements engineering from a theoretical NFR framework to an applicable software quality and relevant software standards.

Toward Alternative Decentralized Infrastructures

New forms of infrastructure are needed in a world characterized by the burdens of global climate change, a growing population, increasing socio-technical complexity, and natural and human stressors to our human systems. Enabling communities to transition to a more resilient configuration of infrastructures is crucial for establishing a distributed portfolio of processes and systems by which human needs may be met. This paper proposes a potential way to increase infrastructure resilience by supporting the creation of alternative, decentralized infrastructures (ADIs) composed of small-scale, heterogeneous systems and processes. We see two possible roles for these ADIs: first, they could be integrated with existing infrastructures in the industrialized world, thereby providing some redundancy during times of strain on larger centralized systems; and second, they could help developing communities leapfrog centralized and more capital intensive conventional infrastructure. We present a model for how ADI systems may be built, based on principles from software engineering. Finally, we identify some challenges that go beyond technical implementation details in the instantiation of ADIs, and offer some thoughts on how to address them.

Designing Sustainable Food Systems

There is significant interest in designing technologies for the food system, from agricultural modeling tools to apps enabling humans to assess nutritional value of various food choices to drones for pest detection. However, a good food system must be a sustainable one. There is an urgent need for deliberation and thoughtfulness in designing for both technologies that support existing food systems and new modalities that work towards more sustainable food systems. This workshop will bring together HCI researchers, designers, and practitioners with an interest in exploring what constitutes a sustainable food system, as well as defining the role of HCI in this domain. Our key objectives for this workshop will be to identify what opportunities for design and collaboration exist and to lay the foundation for an active foodCHI community.

A grand challenge for HCI: food + sustainability

Juliet Norton, University of California, Irvine Ankita Raturi, University of California, Irvine Bonnie Nardi, University of California, Irvine Sebastian Prost, Open Lab, Newcastle University, UK Samantha McDonald, University of California, Irvine Daniel Pargman, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Oliver Bates, Lancaster University Maria Normark, Södertörn University Bill Tomlinson, University of California, Irvine Nico Herbig, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Lynn Dombrowski, Indiana University – Purdue University – Indianapolis

Bridging communities: ICT4Sustainability @iConference 2015

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors

Green Software Engineering Environments

The term ‘software engineering environment’ (SEE) can be used to describe the network of people, software, hardware and infrastructure involved in the construction of software. In the past, research has focused primarily on the energy consumption of SEEs, including, for example, developer’s computers, networking equipment, mobile devices, and servers. In this chapter, we discuss work that has been conducted in investigating energy sinks in the SEE. This work includes existing methods, metrics and tools geared toward optimising and monitoring SEE energy consumption. However, the environmental impacts of creating software systems include more that just plug load energy consumption. The future of making SEEs ‘green’—that is, reducing their environmental and energetic footprints—relies on investigating impacts that are both indirect and direct, extend beyond just the physical development environment and are part of the entire software engineering life cycle.