Sustainable Software Engineering

Sustainable software engineering can be divided into five major dimensions: Technical, Economical, Individual, Social, and Environmental.

Throughout the history of Software Engineering, we have witnessed a number of advancements in the way software systems are conceived. The software industry is now able to have business models and development practices that help continuously improve and maintain software products in the long run.

🌱 We need Greener Software.

Nevertheless, these advancements have been targeting mostly the technical and economical dimensions. In fact, these are the main perspectives used to analyze healthy software businesses. There are however very important dimensions that have been overlooked: individual, social, and environmental. In this research line, we give the spotlight to these three dimensions with a big emphasis on Environmental Sustainability.

🌱 We also need Greener AI.

Our concern includes, of course, AI. The advancement of learning techniques has been solely looking into generating better and more accurate prediction models. For our comfort, the usage of computation-intensive resources has been hidden behind the walls of big cloud servers. However, one cannot disregard their footprint in our environment.

A number of projects are starting to emerge to promote Green Software:

• Principles.Green. Principles of Sustainable Software Engineering.
• Energy Patterns for Mobile Apps. In this project, we collect and reusable solutions for recurrent energy-efficiency problems in iOS and Android applications.
• Leafactor. Automatic refactoring for energy-efficiency.
• Awesome Mobile App Energy Papers. A curated list of academic papers on the energy-efficiency of mobile applications.
• ML CO2 Impact. A tool to estimate Machine Learning carbon footprints.

How to get involved?

We are looking for enthusiastic students that are willing to push the boundaries of sustainable software engineering. If you like the topic, feel free to contact Luís Cruz.