Adrian Friday

Lancaster University | LU · School of Computing and Communications

The growth of semiconductor technology is unprecedented, with profound transformational consequences for society. This includes feeding an over-reliance on digital solutions to systemic problems such as climate change ('techno-solutionism'). Such technologies come at a cost: environmental, social and material. We unpack topics arising from "The Tru...

As Information and Communication Technology (ICT) use has become more prevalent, there has been a growing concern in how its associated greenhouse gas emissions will impact the climate. Estimating such ICT emissions is a difficult undertaking due to its complexity, its rapidly changing nature, and the lack of accurate and up-to-date data on individ...

Using pervasive computing to reduce energy demand of complex commercial premises is extremely challenging in practice. Yet, this is exactly what is needed to help organizations address climate and decarbonization targets. Complex and heterogenous data, changing policy and practice, evolving infrastructures and estates, multiple stakeholders, and tr...

The international treaty known as the Paris Agreement requires global greenhouse gas emissions to decrease at a pace that will limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Given the pressure on all sectors to reduce their emissions to meet this target, the ICT sector must begin to explore how to innovate under constraint for the first time. This co...

The heterogeneity of Deep Learning models, libraries, and hardware poses an important challenge for improving model inference performance. Auto-tuners address this challenge via automatic tensor program optimization towards a target-device. However, auto-tuners incur a substantial time cost to complete given their design necessitates performing ten...

The home has been the subject of investigation in the social sciences and interaction design communities for decades. This has been driven not least by a wish to understand technology, energy demand, and how it might be understood in terms of social practices. In this paper, we reflect on several studies that have sought to capture this relationshi...

A third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to the food sector, however dietary change could reduce this by half. Educating consumers on the environmental impact of their choices through eco-labels as a form of sustainability signalling may be a powerful approach to tackling climate change if it can bring about a large scale t...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2021.100340.].

The UK government has committed to reducing its carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are high energy users, with the largest proportion of their energy demand for space heating; an area still dominated by carbon-intensive fuels. This research addresses the UK HEI space temperature policy landscape, making direc...

The climate emergency and computing's responsibility.

Online food delivery has transformed the last-mile of food and grocery delivery, with unnoticed yet often significant impacts upon the transport and logistics network. This new model of food delivery is not just increasing congestion in urban centers though, it is also changing the contours and qualities of those doing delivery—namely through gig e...

Growing and even excessive use of digital technology has unquestionably fuelled demand for digital devices and online services leading to a wide range of societal and environmental impacts. In sustainability terms, ICT as a whole is estimated to produce up to nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As presumed responsible innovators, the HCI...

Pervasive technologies are already transforming “The Future of Work.” Mobile technologies, IoT, and data promise efficient and convenient work “on-demand.” They are convenient too for platform providers whose clean and efficient interfaces for consumers disrupt marketplaces, offering digitally mediated access to services at a click. These same tech...

In this paper, we critique ICT's current and projected climate impacts. Peer-reviewed studies estimate ICT's current share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at 1.8%–2.8% of global GHG emissions; adjusting for truncation of supply chain pathways, we find that this share could actually be between 2.1% and 3.9%. For ICT's future emissions, we e...

To accelerate the training of Deep Learning (DL) models, clusters of machines equipped with hardware accelerators such as GPUs are leveraged to reduce execution time. State-of-the-art resource managers are needed to increase GPU utilization and maximize throughput. While co-locating DL jobs on the same GPU has been shown to be effective, this can i...

In this report, we examine the available evidence regarding ICT's current and projected climate impacts. We examine peer-reviewed studies which estimate ICT's current share of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to be 1.8-2.8% of global GHG emissions. Our findings indicate that published estimates all underestimate the carbon footprint of ICT, po...

Widespread sensing devices enable a world in which physical spaces become personalised in the presence of mobile users. An important example of such personalisation is the use of pervasive displays to show content that matches the requirements of proximate viewers. Despite prior work on prototype systems that use mobile devices to personalise displ...

The rise of the on-demand economy has led to a rapid increase in the delivery of meals from restaurants and fast food outlets by delivery drivers (DDs) using bicycles, mopeds and cars, with newly-established platform providers handling order and payment processing and, in many cases, the co-ordination of these deliveries. Little is currently unders...

Deep Learning (DL) models are deployed as jobs within machines containing GPUs. These DL systems - ranging from a singular GPU device to machine clusters - require state-of-the-art resource management to increase resource utilization and job throughput. While it has been identified that co-location - multiple jobs co-located within the same GPU - i...

Deep Learning (DL) models are deployed as jobs within machines containing GPUs. These DL systems - ranging from a singular GPU device to machine clusters - require state-of-the-art resource management to increase resource utilization and job throughput. While it has been identified that co-location - multiple jobs co-located within the same GPU - i...

Parcel delivery operations in central London currently consist of drivers using vans. Drivers travel by road, leaving their vehicle parked at the kerbside for up to 60% of the round time while making deliveries on-foot to consignees, walking up to 10 km per day. A trial was carried out in which on-foot porters using wheeled bags made parcel deliver...

Parcel carriers face increasingly difficult operating conditions in busy metropolitan areas due to growing consumer demand for ever faster delivery services and having to cope with traffic congestion and city authority measures that may restrict or penalise access for certain types of vehicle. This paper evaluates the potential environmental and fi...

Why is it that we can have standards on how to achieve comfort [5] and advanced building control systems to implement these standards, yet water cooler 'discussions' about how hot, cold, or generally uncomfortable it is, seem to form a backbone to modern office life [8]? In the UK, domestic space and water heating alone was approximately 80% of the...

Maintaining a consistent indoor temperature causes one of the largest energy demands in UK. UK buildings are famously poorly insulated and expensive to heat and cool. This is set to become ever more challenging in a warming and rapidly changing climate. What if we allowed ourselves to be more uncomfortable and took more charge of our thermal comfor...

According to the latest science of human performance, we are wired to thrive and adapt from discomfort. This workshop explores how to leverage that science to improve human wellbeing and to improve sustainability as a side-effect of designing ubiquitous technology to prepare, practice and perform discomfort, for social benefit. We will use Design J...

Emissions arising from the production and consumption of food are acknowledged as a major contributor to climate change. From a consumer’s perspective, however, the sustainability of food may have many meanings: it may result from eating less meat, becoming vegetarian, or choosing to buy local or organic food. To explore what food sustainability me...

Education is the second largest consumer of energy in the service sector, however, little research to date has focused on the link between education policy and energy demand. Using a case study, this paper explores the role of invisible energy policies in Higher Education (HE). We make a distinctive contribution to debates about invisible energy po...

Internet use and online services underpin everyday life, and the resultant energy demand is almost entirely hidden, yet significant and growing: it is anticipated to reach 21% of global electricity demand by 2030 and to eclipse half the greenhouse gas emissions of transportation by 2040. Driving this growth, real-time video streaming ('watching') i...

Education is the second largest consumer of energy in the service sector, however, little research to date has focused on the link between education policy and energy demand. Using a case study, this paper explores the role of invisible energy policies in Higher Education (HE). We make a distinctive contribution to debates about invisible energy po...

Emissions arising from the production and consumption of food are acknowledged as a major contributor to climate change. From a consumer's perspective, however, the sustainability of food may have many meanings: it may result from eating less meat, becoming vegetarian, or choosing to buy local or organic food. To explore what food sustainability me...

The scale of parcel delivery is increasing rapidly, with indications that it will continue to do so. This presents a challenge both to those in the industry who wish to understand how they might adapt and change their ways of doing delivery and the policymakers who would like to encourage this in order to positively impact urban areas in terms of t...

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. --- Roy Bendor, Editor

Last-mile delivery operations are complex, and the conventional way of using a single mode of delivery (e.g. driving) is not necessarily an efficient strategy. This paper describes a two-level parcel distribution model that combines walking and driving for a single driver. The model aims to minimise the total travelling time by scheduling a vehicle...

Increasingly digital technology is implicated in promoting ever more convenient access to products and services. At just a click, user interfaces promote 'instant gratification', deliberately leveraging human behaviours and addictions, to promote frequent interactions and drive consumer demand. Behind the friendly interface, digital services hide t...

Road congestion, air pollution and sustainability are increasingly important in major cities. We look to understand how last-mile deliveries in the parcel sector are impacting our roads. Using formative field work and quantitative analysis of consignment manifests and location data, we identify how the effectiveness of life-style couriers is contri...

The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new con...

In this SIG, we propose a gathering of the HCI and Sustainability SIGCHI community to strategise future initiatives. This gathering is open to all attendees of CHI'18 and aims to foster an inclusive dialogue about the myriad challenges stemming from the intertwined issues of digital technology design and use with environmental and social justice. A...

Evaluating research artefacts is an important step to showcase the validity of a chosen approach. The CHI community has developed and agreed upon a large variety of evaluation methods for HCI research; however, sometimes those methods are not applicable or not sufficient. This is especially the case when the contribution lies within the context of...

The UK parcel sector generated almost £9 billion in revenue in 2015, with growth expected to increase by 15.6% to 2019 and is characterised by many independent players competing in an ‘everyone-delivers-everywhere’ culture leading to much replication of vehicle activity. With road space in urban centres being increasingly reallocated to pavement wi...

In this paper we present a vision of how ICT can be leveraged to help combat the impact on pollution, congestion and carbon emissions contributed by the parcel delivery sector. This is timely given annual growth in parcel deliveries, especially same-day deliveries, and the need to inform initiatives to clean up our cities such as the sales ban on n...

Growth in e-commerce has led to increasing use of light goods vehicles for parcel deliveries in urban areas. This paper provides an insight into the reasons behind this growth and the resulting effort required to meet the exacting delivery services offered by e-retailers which often lead to poor vehicle utilisation in the last-mile operation, as we...

Digital displays are a ubiquitous feature of our public spaces - both ever present, and "always on". In this paper we use a combination of literature survey, experimental work, and stakeholder interviews to consider if maximising the amount of time such displays are powered on is truly advantageous. We challenge existing practice by considering arg...

The number of parcels delivered is growing annually, with a 15.7% increase to 1 billion parcel deliveries in the UK in 2015. We introduce Freight Traffic Control 2050 which is exploring how to transform last-mile urban freight through ``collaborative logistics'. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork, we introduce the context and challenges in this do...

Motivated by mobile devices' growing demand for connectivity, and concern in HCI with the energy intensity and sustainability of networked services, in this paper we reveal the impact of applications on smartphones and tablets in terms of network demand and time use. Using a detailed mixed methods study with eight participants, we first provide an...

There is increasing interest into how horizontal collaboration between parcel carriers might help alleviate problems associated with last-mile logistics in congested urban centres. Through a detailed examination of parcel logistics literature pertaining to collaboration, along with practical insights from carriers operating in the UK, this paper ex...

In this article, the authors present a case study of their experiences in using existing IoT infrastructure to create a campus-scale "living laboratory" for promoting energy savings and environmental sustainability. As a series of lessons for others creating IoT systems from existing city infrastructures, they present the challenges they've experie...

There is increasing interest into how horizontal collaboration between parcel carriers might help alleviate problems associated with last-mile logistics in congested urban centres. Through a detailed examination of parcel logistics literature pertaining to collaboration, along with practical insights from carriers operating in the UK, this paper ex...

The sustainability of food is a significant global concern with drastic change required to mitigate complex social, environmental and economic issues like climate change and food security for an ever increasing population. In this paper, we set out to understand the place of food in people’s lives, their mundane yet surprisingly complex ways of sou...

We have developed a set of cards that may be used as a tool to assist in formulating a conversation around what a sustainable diet may be, how design may be implicated, and how design may assist in generating potential interventions that may shift the current situation to drive change. The cards are an engagement tool that we hope will facilitate...

Traditional digital signage analytics are based on a display-centric view of the world, reporting data on the content shown augmented with frequency of views and possibly classification of the audience demographics. What these systems are unable to provide, are insights into viewers' overall experience of content. This is problematic if we want to...

The increasing reach of the Internet of Things (IoT) is leading to a world rich in sensors [3] that can be used to support physical analytics -- analogous to web analytics but targeted at user interactions with physical devices in the real-world (e.g. [2]). In contrast to web analytics, physical analytics systems typically only provide data relatin...

In 2006, we reported lessons from two years experience with pervasive displays [4]. These experiences helped shape the development of the e-Campus platform that now includes 50 networked displays in a variety of residential, office and public spaces at Lancaster University. e-Campus has been running continuously as a research testbed for more than...

There has been much interest in the Sharing Economy in recent years, accompanied with the hope that it will change and specifically make better use of existing resources. It intuitively makes sense, from a sustainability point of view, that the sharing of resources is good. It could even be said that the Sharing Economy ought to align well with Com...

This discussion paper considers the nature of growth in data traffic across the Internet, as a basis for asking whether and how such growth might slow down or otherwise be limited. Over the last decade, data growth has been dramatic, and forecasts predict a similar ongoing pattern. Since this is associated with increasing electricity consumption, s...

Food is a surprisingly large portion of personal GhG emissions (estimated for the UK at 27% of total emissions). Could pervasive technologies help us to influence diet choice to reduce this? We reflect on the complexity of intervening in the food we buy and eat, and offer insights for designers of pervasive technologies addressing food and sustaina...

In this forum we highlight innovative thought, design, and research in the area of interaction design and sustainability, illustrating the diversity of approaches across HCI communities. — Lisa Nathan and Samuel Mann, Editors projects we became intrigued by significant changes in practice that occurred during life transitions. In the following sect...

In many parts of the world, the electricity supply industry makes the task of dealing with unpredictable spikes and dips in production and demand invisible to consumers, maintaining a seemingly unlimited supply. A future increase in reliance on time-variable renewable sources of electricity may lead to greater fluctuations in supply. We engaged rem...

This paper empirically explores the role that mobile devices have come to play in everyday practice, and how this links to demand for network connectivity and online services. After a preliminary device-logging period, thirteen participants were interviewed about how they use their iPhones or iPads. Our findings build a picture of how, through use...

Pervasive computing is beginning to offer the potential to rethink and redefine how technology can support human memory augmentation. For example, the emergence of widespread pervasive sensing, personal recording technologies, and systems for the quantified self are creating an environment in which it's possible to capture fine-grained traces of ma...

Designing with the community brings about a number of benefits, including tacit and contextual knowledge about the problem domain; this is especially apparent in rural settings. However, designing for problems that have yet to embed themselves in the fabric of society (i.e. future problems) poses a number of challenges, as they typically present in...

As the cost of display hardware falls so the number of public display networks being deployed is increasing rapidly. While these networks have traditionally taken the form of digital signage used for advertising and information there is increasing interest in the vision of \open display networks" [8]. A key component of any open display network is...

We are exploring attitudes to renewable energy supply with the remote island community of Tiree. As part of this engagement, we are working with local children to introduce the topic of the energy generation potential of renewables (i.e. from wind and solar power). In this paper, we report on our early attempts to broker this engagement using a phy...

Tightly regulating indoor building temperatures using mechanical heating and cooling contributes significantly to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. One promising approach for reducing the energy demand associated with indoor climate control is the adaptive model for thermal comfort. In this paper, we explore the challenges and opportunities for s...

In this paper we investigate the willingness of public display owners to support cyber-foraging (appropriation) of displays by mobile users. Large digital displays are common in public and semi-public spaces and have the potential to provide a useful infrastructure for mobile users. Supporting display-foraging is not just a technical problem but wi...

While traditional displays networks are typically closed systems, researchers are now beginning to explore the notion of open display networks in which content can be obtained from a wide range of sources. Open display networks have very different properties to closed networks as they need to deal with multiple management domains and conflicting co...

To date, research in sustainable HCI has dealt with ecofeedback, usage and recycling of appliances within the home, and longevity of portable electronics such as mobile phones. However, there seems to be less awareness of the energy and greenhouse emissions impacts of domestic consumer electronics and information technology. Such awareness is neede...

There is increasing interest in using digital signage to deliver highly personalised content. However, display personalization presents a number of architectural design challenges in particular, how best to provide personalisation without unduly compromising viewers' privacy. While previous research has focused on understanding specific elements of...

With peak oil behind us, nuclear generation capacity dwindling, and increasingly daunting looking carbon emissions targets, we are moving to a world where we must consider transitioning to renewable energy sources. Renewables are time varying and their inherent unpredictability must challenge our everyday assumptions around energy availability-lead...

In many parts of the world, mechanical heating and cooling is used to regulate indoor climates, with the aim of maintaining a uniform temperature. Achieving this is energy-intensive, since large indoor spaces must be constantly heated or cooled, and the difference to the outdoor temperature is large. This paper starts from the premise that comfort...