This document summarizes a presentation on achieving a sustainable future through tools like ICT and energy, and the responsibility of actors like societies, businesses, and individuals. It discusses how exponential connectivity growth and scarce resources pose challenges. It proposes dematerialization using virtualization and resource sharing enabled by wireless connectivity. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind are discussed, along with distributed and efficient energy. It argues all actors have responsibility, and changes in individual actions could significantly impact societies if aligned. Education is key to empowering responsible individual actions.

1. A Sustainable Future: Potentials of our Tools (ICT and Energy) and Responsibility of our Actors (Societies, Businesses, and Individuals) Un avenir durable : Potentiels de nos outils (les TIC et de l'énergie) et la responsabilité de nos acteurs (sociétés , entreprises , et personnes)
Reza FARRAHI MOGHADDAM1,2
1Synchromedia Lab, ETS, UduQ, Montreal, QC, Canada
2CIRODD, Montreal, QC, Canada
ÉTS conférences midi sur les enjeux énergétiques: Le développement durable au service de l’énergie
A-1600, ETS, October 17th, 2014

2. Abstract
The talk focuses on the inevitable challenges that we will face in our life journey in upcoming years and decodes considering both scarcity of resources and exponential growth in connectivity (in all three dimensions of coverage, volume, and speed). Some approaches to understand the source of these challenges and also some potential modifications in living style toward a sustainable future are discussed.
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3. Highlights from Outline
•Chapter 1: Sustainable Future
–Definition of Sustainability
–Dematerialization
–Intangible “Properties”
–Knowledge without Boundary
•Chapter 2: ICT and Energy
–Wireless Everywhere
–“True” Renewable Energy
–Distributed Energy
–Energy Efficiency
•Chapter 3: Actors
– Societies, Businesses, and People
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4. SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
Chapter 1
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5. Definition of Sustainability
•What is “Sustainability”?
•First attempt: Respecting natural resources
–Resource oriented
•Second attempt: Respecting two other pillars
–Society and Economy (more realistic)
•What is next?
•Our proposal (Sustainability Pentagon)
–Identification, Recognition, and Engagement of all Actors
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6. World’s Population
•6 Billion by 2000, done!
•7.2 Billion now (2014), done! (20% in just 14 years)
•9.6 Billion by 2050
–Only 37% increase in population in 35 years
–But, moving away from inequality:
•Meat Consumption/year/capita: 41 kg  52 kg (i.e., a total of (1.37)(1.27) - 1= 74% increase in meat consumption)
•Meat is not everything
•11 Billion by 2100
–Corrected from a previous projection of 9 Billion
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7. Dematerialization
•A key element in the IPCC scenarios to curb the climate change
–In Transport, Buildings, Energy industry itself, etc
•ICT sector is the flagship of dematerialization
–However, not really the first:
•Books dematerialized the story telling business
–Resource Sharing and Virtualization
•Resource Sharing does not always mean Virtualization
–ex: Linux Containers
•Virtualization is not necessarily equivalent to Cloud Computing
•The main problem is not how to dematerialize, but why we perform all those activities at the first place
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8. I “act,” therefore I exist
•Types of action:
–Type I: Acting on self (or others’) properties
–Type II: Owning new properties
•Rene Descartes’ act of “thinking” is a special case Type I actions with respect to intangible properties
–First hint on intangible properties:
•You cannot think about a movie that you have on a DVD but you have not watched it yet
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9. Intangible “properties”
•Not every intangible “thing” (res) is an intangible “property”
•“thing” or res: a ciphered intangible res carried by a tangible carrier (ex: a Movie on a DVD)
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10. Example of a movie on DVD
•You buy a movie on DVD:
–DVD: Tangible res (carrier)
–Movie on DVD: A ciphered intangible res
–Memory and Experience after watching that movie: Your intangible property
•Your intangible property is (hopefully):
nontransferable and non-cloneable
•Ciphered intangible res is cloneable and transferable, however, nobody would clone them in future:
–Their number will exponentially increase
–The capacity of intangible properties would be constant
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11. Tangible res also show symptoms of intangible res
•Ex1: The popular example of “Bubble” or “Balloon”
•A balloon is tangible but ephemeral
•A popular concept in many fields
•Ex2: Owner of an enterprise w.r.t. properties of that enterprise
•Owner thinks of them as his own properties
•However, his “management bandwidth” could not handle it
•Other actors will actually manage those properties for him (trust)
•Although it is based on trust and contract, there will be no guarantee
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12. Credit, Money, and Digital Currencies
•Credit: A non-local intangible property between two parties:
–Actual owner (creditor) and implicit owner (credited)
•Money: Exchangeable, ciphered carrier of credit
•Digital currencies: Good exercise to shape and mature understanding and handling of intangible properties and ciphered intangible res
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13. Knowledge without Boundary
•Knowledge without Boundary
–Best Practices (BPs)
–Locked BPs (Intellectual Property)
•Disadvantage to those actors residing in the locked regions versus those in the unmonitored regions
–Unverifiable, suboptimal, but claimed BPs
•Parallel concept: Knowledge without Border
–Well practiced because of mobility of scientists
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14. ICT AND ENERGY
Chapter 2
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15. The Need for a dematerialized life style
–Large volumes of ciphered intangible res:
•“Embedded” in tangible res
–Internet of Things (IoT) is not just about command-and-control or tracking of tangible res, such as cars. It is more related to smart leveraging the ciphered intangible res carried by them (for example, sensory-enabled things)
•“Stored” in Data Center
–Seamless access to them:
–Connectivity among “human beings”, “tangible res”, and “ciphered intangible res”
•3D Problem: Coverage, Speed, and Volume (CSV)
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16. The Need for a dematerialized life style, Cont’d
•AAA-grade CSV Connected World:
–Coverage: Wireless Everywhere
–Speed: Low latency
–Volume: Broadband wireless
•5G radio access:
–LTE Advanced (3GPP Rel-10) + Enhancements
•Novel smart solutions are required:
–Energy efficient
–Better performance
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17. “True” Renewable Energy
•Is solar energy really renewable?
•Counter example: Concentrated solar power (CSP)
–Water Consumption in their cooling system is similar to that of natural gas power plants
–New designs are required to make CSPs water friendly
•Consumption and footprint in manufacturing of related equipment, and also in their decommissioning
–Finite lifespan of wind farms
–Need to perform analyses: Life cycle assessment (LCA)
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18. Wind Energy vs. Solar Energy
•Solar energy:
–A considerable amount of absorbed solar energy is converted in atmospheric heat (instead of being reflected back into the outer space)
•The original problem of the GHGs
•Wind Energy:
–Extracts energy from the atmosphere, possible benefits in reducing rate and severity of storms
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19. Distributed Energy
•Components:
–Reduction in Energy Consumption
–Temporal Demand Management:
•Our proposed Federally-Managed Smart House
–Distributed Energy Sources
–Distributed Energy Storage
•Example: Rooftop solar panels + Local energy storage
•Off grid could be unsafe, but Net metering makes sense
•Similarity to: Public Transport + Personal cars
–Higher adoption of distributed energy means more subsidies to the grid from the tax revenue, similar to subsidies to public transport
–Buses pass in front of your house, no matter you use them or not
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20. Energy Efficiency: The World’s First Fuel (IEA)
•A decade of Energy Efficiency is equivalent to:
Total final consumption of the USA and Germany combined in 2012
•Having less consumption w.r.t. baseline is no longer a green light:
–“Zero Consumption is the new Consumption Reduction”
•Energy Efficiency vs. Conservation
–A combination of both: Up to 30% reduction
•Role of ICT:
–Smart management of activities and resources
•The case of smart DVFS for HPC workloads
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21. ACTORS: SOCIETIES, ENTERPRISES, AND INDIVIDUALS
Chapter 3
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22. There is no such an actor as “Society”
•There are many societies:
–City: Montreal, Stockholm, Beijing
–Neighborhood: Griffintown, Rosemont Petite-Patrie
–ETS residence
•Societies interact with each other:
–Horizontally, Hierarchically, among other forms
•Each society is responsible for its own actions
•Geographical, social, and other distances would make societies unaware of each other
–Region A assumes itself sustainable while it has not carried out any action w.r.t. pollution in Region B
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23. There is more than just societies: “Enterprises”
•Some similarities with societies:
–Collective actions of a collection of actors
•However, a business’ actions are directed toward a goal different from the better good of its actors
•From being the bad guys of the past to becoming front-runners of the sustainable future
–Engagement, not just reporting
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24. A society is not equivalent to its “individuals”
•Every individual is responsible for their actions
•Super-alignment of individuals’ actions could reach the scales of the enterprise or society actions
–It may require lower “temperatures”
•Similar to superconductors
•Achievable using more passive interactions
•Role of
–Education: Knowledge transfer & Problem solving skills
–Interaction: Recognition & Indirect knowledge transfer
–Self-confidence:
•back to the first square: “I act, therefore I exist”
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25. Thank you!
Questions
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26. Further Readings
•Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, and Mohamed Cheriet. A Graph-based Perspective to Total Carbon Footprint Assessment of Non-marginal Technology-driven Projects - Use case of OTT/IPTV. 2014. [arXiv preprint arXiv: 1409.0876, September 2014].
•Reza Farrahi Moghaddam and Mohamed Cheriet. A note on quality of experience (QoE) beyond quality of service (QoS) as the baseline. 2014. [arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.5527, July 2014].
•Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, and Mohamed Cheriet. A modified GHG intensity indicator: Toward a sustainable global economy based on a carbon border tax and emissions trading. Energy Policy, 57:363–380, June 2013. [ArXiv preprint: arXiv:1110.1567, October 2011].
•Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, and Mohamed Cheriet. A multi-entity input output (MEIO) approach to sustainability-water-energy-ghg (WEG) footprint statements in use cases from Auto and Telco industries. 2014. [arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.6227, April 2014].
•Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, and Mohamed Cheriet. Progress in Economics Research, volume 29 (Taxes and the Economy: Government Policies, Macroeconomic Factors and Impacts on Consumption and the Environment), chapter IIGHGINT: A generalization to the modified GHG intensity universal indicator toward a production/consumption insensitive border carbon tax, pages 131–147. NOVA Science Publishers, 2014. [ArXiv preprint: arXiv:1401.0301, January 2014].
•Reza Farrahi Moghaddam, Fereydoun Farrahi Moghaddam, Thomas Dandres, Yves Lemieux, Réjean Samson, and Mohamed Cheriet. Challenges and complexities in application of LCA approaches in the case of ICT for a sustainable future. In ICT4S’14, pages 155–164, Stockholm, Stockholm, Sweden, August 24-27 2014. [ArXiv preprint: arXiv:1403.2798, March 2014].
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27. Biography
Reza FARRAHI MOGHADDAM received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and his Ph.D. degree in Physics from the Kerman University, Iran, in 1995 and 2003, respectively. He has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a Research Associate with the Synchromedia Laboratory for Multimedia Communication in Telepresence, École de technologie supérieure (University of Quebec) in Montreal (QC), Canada since 2007 and 2012, respectively. Dr. Farrahi has published more than 50 technical papers. His research interests include sustainability, behavior analysis, green ICT, green economy, perception, and optimization. He is a member of the IEEE.
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28. Synchromedia Lab
Synchromedia was founded in 1988 as a part of the Department of Automation Engineering at the École de technologie supérieure of University of Quebec, with founding members from 4 University of Quebec institutions. Effective Mars 2005, the group has been awarded a $4 million CFI grant to build a Pan-Canadian Consortium. The group works on a wide diversity of pertinent research areas. Synchromedia core theme consists in an intelligent and seamless integration of various perceptual modes of information that allows collaborative management and sharing of information, actions and behaviors beyond the mere multimedia teleconferencing and communication.
Synchromedia Director Prof Mohamed CHERIET received the B.Sc. CE (Bab Ezzouar University, Algiers), DEA and Doctorate of University of Paris 6 (Paris 6, France). As a scientist and educator, Prof Cheriet has taken an active role in publishing technical papers and authoring books. He has published more than 70 international journal papers and 135 international conference papers, and has delivered 17 invited talks. In addition, he has authored and published 6 books. Prof Cheriet is also recognized for his activities in technical journal editorial writing, organizing and taking part in many conferences. He has contributed to the training of more than 65 high qualified personnel. He has also served as chair of the IEEE’s Montreal CIS Chapter.
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