clean-IT: Towards Sustainable Digital Technologies

1. 00:00Ladies and Gentlemen, I welcome you to our clean
2. 00:06IT that's an initiative of the Hasso Plattner Institute
3. 00:10towards sustainable digital technologies.
4. 00:14Our world is characterized by the digital transformation.
5. 00:18Around the world the society are changed by the digital technologies,
6. 00:24it has changed how we communicate with each other, it is changed
7. 00:27how we produce things, it's changed how we educate
8. 00:31people, it's changed how societies are organized, and if
9. 00:36you want to see who are we humans in this digital transformation
10. 00:43then please look here, there
11. 00:46we are and that's a great wave that is changing our world.
12. 00:52People and machines are globally interconnected by the internet.
13. 00:58The internet is about 50 years old and provides the mean
14. 01:03and stance for all the changes coming by the introduction of digital technologies.
15. 01:09So to give only one figure that's the development of the number of
16. 01:15smart devices that are devices or machines,
17. 01:21cars, smartphones,
18. 01:25sensors that can use the internet to interconnect with each other.
19. 01:3050 billion, this is what we see in a couple of years of such smart devices
20. 01:36which are used to organize our life. And on the other side, we
21. 01:41have the world as it is, with all the huge problems concerning
22. 01:47poverty, concerning the climate, concerning that not
23. 01:53all humans have enough to eat,
24. 01:57not all the people are educated in the world
25. 02:00and this has resulted in the sustainable development goals,
26. 02:07which describes the goals of humanity which are formulated
27. 02:12by the United Nations.
28. 02:14And the interesting thing is with the digital
29. 02:16technologies, we can tackle a lot of such global society challenges
30. 02:24which are described by this sustainable development goals.
31. 02:29We can provide
32. 02:33better control and interaction of machine of production processes
33. 02:38by avoiding traveling, by means of digital technologies, we can impact
34. 02:44the climate question and help to solve climate problem, we can provide better education
35. 02:52to people, we can by means of the digital technologies improve health care system,
36. 02:59we can improve the production, we can do something
37. 03:04against poverty and hunger around the world. Ao
38. 03:09a lot of contributions are expected coming from the digital technology
39. 03:15to solve this a UN sustainable development goals.
40. 03:21So here at Hasso Plattner Institute we have such a dashboard with actually shows
41. 03:29where we are, in which way we contribute to the a sustainable development goals.
42. 03:37Here are the 17 goals and the different contributions you
43. 03:42can see this here on our website which is defined.
44. 03:47But the digital technologies
45. 03:52can not only contribute to services problems,
46. 03:56the digital technologies also cause new problems.
47. 04:01The technologies contribute significantly to the global
48. 04:05carbon emissions.
49. 04:07So digital technologies will
50. 04:10help to decrease carbon emissions in other sectors by providing means to find
51. 04:17control complex systems
52. 04:20by the possibilities which are provided by artificial intelligence
53. 04:25by use of data analytics. So very important contribution will
54. 04:30come by digital technologies to decrease the carbon emissions, but same time
55. 04:36carbon emissions of all the computing systems of all the internet
56. 04:42is increasing and need to be reduced.
57. 04:48To give a few examples, so if we look to the environmental impact of digitalisation
58. 04:55and compare this and look to the global internet traffic
59. 05:01on the rise which is rising, and if we consider what kind of energy is needed
60. 05:08to organise this, then it's very impressive to look to the number of data
61. 05:14that are transmitted over the internet. So the internet traffic globally
62. 05:21starts 10 years- 15 years ago so from 54
63. 05:27Exabyte, then to Zetabyte up to 4.2 ZB and
64. 05:36to remind you Exabytes, this is one billion
65. 05:40Gigabytes, and Zetabyte it is one trillion Gigabytes. So there is a huge
66. 05:47data traffic around the world that is needed to push
67. 05:53the digitalization and to push the digital transformation.
68. 05:57And if we look to the environmental impact of digitalisation,
69. 06:01then today the use of the digital systems, computers, smartphones, networks
70. 06:10needs more energy than the production of these devices.
71. 06:17So using digital systems consumes already today more energy
72. 06:22than producing computers, smartphones and it
73. 06:27will rise in future much more which is shown in The Shift Project
74. 06:33from 2017.
75. 06:35If we look for some examples, for example how much energy is needed
76. 06:40to train an AI model with the technologies from today,
77. 06:46then we see that to train AI model needs about the same energy
78. 06:54and produces about the same amount of carbon emission like
79. 06:59300 round trip lives flights between San francisco and New York,
80. 07:05or like 5 car life cycles from production over the running.
81. 07:12So one AI model to train needs so much energy.
82. 07:18And if you see what is assumed to be provided by
83. 07:23artificial intelligence, we need to do something.
84. 07:27Here another example, this example I have to mention it
85. 07:31was before Corona crisis, even before Corona crisis arises, this is a huge
86. 07:38air traffic, the carbon footprint of all the
87. 07:45airplanes around the world was half as much like the
88. 07:52carbon footprint of the IT ot the information technology.
89. 07:59So these are impressive numbers and this is
90. 08:04the result and that from Hasso Plattner Institute we discussed about that
91. 08:09as a developer of such new technologies
92. 08:13we felt responsible also to
93. 08:17bring awareness to this fact. And this was exactly the birth
94. 08:22date of our clean IT initiative. We launched it at the World Economic Forum,
95. 08:282020 in Davos
96. 08:31and the idea of the initiative is to contribute to reduce the energy needs
97. 08:39by increasing the power of digital technology.
98. 08:44So HPI signs the UN Global Compact contract, our clean IT initiative
99. 08:52was launched, we invited partner and we encouraged the researcher in HPI
100. 08:59to research an energy efficient IT systems, computer systems
101. 09:04AI algorithms and in this way to support
102. 09:09the SDG's. So this is a reason that we want to see what we are doing
103. 09:16with the SDG dashboard. So here are some partners, the SAP
104. 09:22the largest European
105. 09:26digital company, we get interested by our partner university
106. 09:33is like Technion or the University
107. 09:38of Technology in Beijing. We incorporated and invited
108. 09:44associations like the eco, IEEE
109. 09:51to partner in this clean initiative and
110. 09:55technical the German Academie of Technique
111. 10:00Sciences.
112. 10:03What is a clean IT forum? Here we want to provide a virtual platform
113. 10:09to exchange ideas, to exchange information about clean IT projects,
114. 10:16about clean IT activities.
115. 10:18So you can find on the forum and you can also contribute with your
116. 10:23knowledge and your ideas on how to save energy using digital devices
117. 10:29in everyday life. We will show and introduce, discuss our clean
118. 10:35IT solutions from HPI
119. 10:37and we will discuss the clean IT solutions and introduce
120. 10:42clean IT solutions from our partners I already mentioned.
121. 10:47So the contributions of HPI go in different directions, so
122. 10:52we look for energy efficient algorithms and databases, we look
123. 10:57for energy-aware computing, next generation computing centers
124. 11:03and for energy efficient AI systems.
125. 11:08So we see clean IT forum that is using and that can be reached
126. 11:14on openhpi.de platform. We share
127. 11:20with you practical ideas, conceptions, and solutions. Please also contribute,
128. 11:26send us video clips, send us other material which we
129. 11:33want to present here in our forum, which we want to discuss in our forum
130. 11:38to push energy-efficient
131. 11:44IT technologies forward.

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