Speakers & abstracts

Monday 7th October

3:50 - 4pm Opening the school: Laurent Lefevre (Inria), Anne-Cécile Orgerie (CNRS), Chrystelle Mouton (ENS de Lyon) & Marilou Gaborel (Univ. Rennes)

4pm - 7pm Cloud materiality, what mitigation strategy?: Gregory Lebourg - Global Environmental Programs Director at OVHcloud

Abstract: The lecture will go through a physical description of the Cloud underlying infrastructure, the miscellaneous design options that can be envisaged, their environmental impact, how to measure this impact accurately and the technological levers that can be activated to mitigate it. As a conclusion, some examples will illustrate how the end-user can contribute in its daily usage arbitration.

Bio: More than 25 years in the Engineering, Telco and IT industry, has held miscellaneous positions in project management, design, operations, sourcing and business ownership roles. After completing Ecole des Mines in France he joined the Kvaerner group, spending 5 years in design and construction of steel making plants in the US, Spain and Brazil. In 2000 he joined the Orange group to take the lead of its European Backbone Network deployment then the financial management of its worldwide Terrestrial Backbone Networks before moving in 2009 to the Orange group subsidiary dedicated to the Trading industry (Etrali) where he became in 2012 a COMEX member. In 2018 he joined OVHcloud as Global Infrastructure Director, responsible for the planning, design, turnkey delivery of OVH worldwide Network and Datacenters infrastructure. End of 2022, he was appointed Environmental Programs Director in charge of a broad range of projects designing and implementing OVHcloud's environmental strategy.

Tuesday 8th October

9am - 12am End-of-Life of Digital Equipment: The E-Waste Problem: Anne-Laure Ligozat (ENSIIE)

Abstract: The end-of-life phase of digital equipment is often overlooked. Even when it is considered, modeling its impact tends to obscure the true extent of the problem. In this course, I will explore the environmental issues associated with the end-of-life of digital equipment, discuss current knowledge, and highlight ongoing research topics.

Bio: Anne-Laure Ligozat is a professor in computer science at LISN and ENSIIE. Her research addresses environmental impacts of Information and Communication Technologies, and in particular Artificial Intelligence. She coordinates a working group on e-waste within the EcoInfo collective.

2pm - 5pm What future for digital technology in a carbon-neutral world? - Prospective workshop based on ADEME's work: Julia Meyer & Thomas Delatour (ADEME)

Abstract: The first part of this presentation aims to present the ADEME organization and its specific role for digital sobriety in France. Hhow a country like France is tackling the challenges of digital sustainability at different scales ? The second part is a workshop devoted to the evolution of the use of digital technologies in France, based on ADEME's various prospective scenarios.

Bio: Julia and Thomas both graduated from an engineering school in Nantes in 2019. Julia joined ADEME in 2020 to build the organization's expertise in digital sustainability. After a PhD in eco-design and operation research, Thomas joined Julia in the newly ADEME service dedicated to digital sobriety.

Wednesday 9th October

9am - 12am Teaching Computing, and the Envrionment: Between modesty, and ambition: Olivier Ridoux (Université de Rennes)

Abstract: Teaching Computing and the Environment starts with arguing about the legitimacy of teaching such a program, and continues with imagining a content according to a public, to an objective, and to the place this teaching is given. We will answer with a bootstrap principle, that is "start with what you have", a kind of modesty, and a no known limits principle, that is "accept to reach far from your basis", a kind of ambition. We will present actual teaching experiments, and actual struggles for installing Computing and the Environment in teaching programs.

Bio: Olivier is a Computing Science professor at University of Rennes, and a researcher at IRISA. His most constant domain of interest is the use of logic for computing, modeling and accessing data. He is inclined to apply his ideas in distant domains, most often linguistics or natural science. He is used to operational responsibilities, twice Head of a teaching department, once Head of a research department, several times Head of different teaching programs, and is familiar with the mix of farseeing and pragmatics this implies.

5:30pm - 7:30pm Conversation: Adrien Berthelot, Emmanuel Gnibga, Pierre Jacquet, Mathilde Jay, Simon Lambert, Vladimir Ostapenco, Marc Tranzer

Thursday 10th October

9am - 12am Lowtechnisation, a technological design method aimed at socio-ecological values: Stéphane Crozat (Université Technologie de Compiègne)

Abstract:Lowtechisation is a method derived from value engineering and agile software development, focusing on socio-ecological issues (we address the specification step of engineering, before any realization). The purpose of lowtechisation is to write functional specifications and assess them with qualitative tools based on environnemental sustainability, social responsibility and technical conviviality. We will present the main concepts and steps of the method, quickly discover a few tools (user stories, self-assessment tools...) and review some existing student projects.

Bio: Stéphane Crozat is a teacher in the computer science department of Université de Technologie de Compiègne and a researcher in the Costech lab. He publishes the web sites Aswemay (https://aswemay.fr) to share his researches, Librecours (https://librecours.net) to share his teaching and Lownum (https://lownum.fr) to contribute on lowtechisation. He is member of Framasoft and Picasoft, non-profit association oriented toward free culture for digital technologies.

2pm - 5pm Large dynamic system: applications to Earth analysis or ICT: Philippe Ciblat (Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris)

Abstract:Understanding environmental crisis requires to model interactions and to exhibit relevant criteria. Large dynamic systems may be an appropriate tool to pave that way. Therefore this talk is split into three parts: i) we provide some criteria to optimize, ii) we show that some models rely on differential equations or systemic charts and analyze them mathemetically or numerically, and then iii) we apply the previous approach to ICT based system to understand some positive and negative interactions and offer a global picture of the concern.

Bio: 1996: Engineering degree from Telecom Paris & M.Sc. degree in automatic control and signal processing from Université Paris-Saclay. 2000:  Ph.D. degree, Université Gustave Eiffel where he received the HDR in 2007. 2001: Postdoctoral Researcher, Université de Louvain, Belgium. 2001:  Associate Professor, Telecom Paris, (full) professor in 2011. 2009 - 2020:  head of Digital Communications Team. 2004 - 2007: Associate Editor for the IEEE Communications Letters. 2008 - 2012: Associate Editor and then Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. 2014 - 2019: member of IEEE Technical Committee "Signal Processing for Communications and Networking". 2018 - 2021: Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks. His research areas include statistical signal processing, signal processing for digital communications, resource allocation, distributed optimization, signal over graphs, and machine learning, and the environmental impact of ICT.

Friday 11th October

9am - 10:30am Debriefing of the school and quiz session: Laurent Lefèvre (Inria), Anne-Cécile Orgerie (CNRS)

10:30am - 12:00am SmolPhone: a smartphone with energy limits: Martin Quinson (ENS de Rennes)

Abstract:The SmolPhone project explores the smartphone design space toward sobriety. At its core, the proposed platform has a compute-limited but energy efficient microcontroller (MCU). Another processor can be attached to execute legacy Linux applications. Compute intensive data coming from the Internet are pretreated on a cloud proxy to become suitable to the low-power device. In this talk, I will present the project motivation by reviewing some definitions of low-tech computing. I will also situate this project in my academic carrier that was oriented toward high-performance and low-latency until recently. Finally, I will present the current state of the project and sketch the planned work in the coming year.

Bio: Martin Quinson is a Professor at the IRISA laboratory with the École Normale Supérieure of Rennes and with Rennes University. His research is on experimentation methodologies for distributed systems, both through simulation of performance, and through software model checking of correctness. He is also one of the main developers of the SimGrid toolkit.