Digital services have grown explosively in recent years, and the AI boom has brought their environmental impact into sharper focus. Yet quantifying the footprint of a “service” is far from straightforward: it spans the ICT stack end-to-end, with computation split across user devices, servers, and data centres, while also consuming network bandwidth. Furthermore, these heterogeneous hardware resources are shared by different services which are also extremely diversified in their workloads.
Beyond operational energy use, a large fraction of environmental cost is embedded in the manufacture, deployment, and end-of-life of digital infrastructure. How should these embodied impacts be allocated to services, especially when services also influence user behaviour and, ultimately, investment decisions about how infrastructures are built and upgraded? This talk aims to give a deeper perspective on this matter, highlighting challenges and open questions.
Bio:
Viviana Arrigoni is a researcher at the Department of Computer Science at Sapienza, University of Rome. Her main research interests include Networking and Optimisation, but she has also worked in numerical Linear Algebra and AI and causality for time series. She recently won the MSCA postdoctoral fellowship, and she will be hosted at the Technical University of Berlin starting next October. At Télécom Paris she works with Prof. Leonardo Linguaglossa on studying and modelling the environmental impact of digital services.