featured project
InterNET ZERO
Towards Resource Responsible Trustworthy Autonomous Systems
As the Internet expands through paradigms like Internet of Things devices, multi-player gaming, videotelephony and the Metaverse, autonomous systems are increasingly necessitated to mediate society’s unfettered dataflows.
Due to their perceived immateriality, autonomous systems built on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are often promoted as resource efficient technologies which help mitigate the unsustainable impacts of the Internet’s rapidly expanding data-driven ecosystem. Yet because of their ubiquity and scale, the environmental impacts of hyperscale autonomous systems are intensifying and their sustainable trustworthiness frequently undermined.
These systems can themselves be extremely energy hungry and create huge amounts of CO2 emissions. Subsequently, they contribute to digital technology’s growing global carbon footprint which is currently around 4% of worldwide emissions.
Funded by the UKRI EPSRC TAS Hub, the InterNET ZERO project will aim to help tackle the environmental, social and technical challenges being presented by autonomous Internet technologies by transforming academic knowledge into practice.