Advanced Topics in Sustainable Computing

The course critically examines computing systems within the context of planetary ecological limits, resource constraints, and broader societal sustainability challenges. The course treats sustainability not only as a technical optimisation problem, but as a socio-technical issue that spans computer science, environmental science, economics, policy, and human-computer interaction. Students will investigate the environmental impacts of ICT infrastructures across their lifecycle, including operational and embodied emissions, material extraction, e-waste, and the growing energy and water demands of datacentres, networking infrastructure, edge computing, and IoT systems. The course introduces students to critical assessment of rebound effects (through an innovative teaching method), technocentrism, and the sustainability implications of continued growth in computational demand. In addition to examining the sustainability of ICT itself, the course explores how computing can support broader sustainability transitions through lifecycle analysis, optimisation, and sustainability-oriented design. Topics include automated LCA analysis with large language models, sustainable HCI, sustainability by design, frugal computing, and sustainability standards and certifications. A semestre-long research project forms the core of the course, requiring students to conduct an original investigation into a sustainable computing problem (ideally tied with their PhD research area) and present their findings through presentations and a final report.