Dr. Jari Porras ’93, (MS, Computer Science) will present a lecture Monday, December 13, 2021, at 1:00 p.m. in Rekhi 214. The title of his talk is, “Integrating sustainability into software engineering education.”
Dr. Porras’s research interests include software for sustainability; innovation; technologies and approaches for communications; parallel and distributed computing; networks (social, technical, business); and education development.
Lecture Title
“Integrating sustainability into software engineering education”
Lecture Abstract
”Tackling climate change is not a choice, it’s a necessity” A. Shah, Mahindra Group, 2021
Climate change is one of the most urgent challenges our ecosystems are facing today.
To avoid irreversible ecosystems breakdown, rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society are required. Such changes are also necessary within the IT sector and not simply because the estimated impact of IT systems’ high energy consumption is equivalent to that of the aviation industry’s (i.e., 2% of global CO2 emissions). More importantly, IT products deployed in our societies re-define our businesses and consumer behavior. To enable the transformation academia should include the necessary knowledge, skills, and competencies into the curricula. This presentation illustrates research (and administration) activities that have led to one approach to the needed education.
LUT University has been focusing on sustainable development both in research and in education since the Trailblazers strategy was announced in 2013. Prof. Jari Porras started his research on this topic around the same time with the EU-funded Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme Perccom – Pervasive computing and communications for sustainable development. Since the Perccom programme, Prof. Porras has been leading several sustainable IT projects and that has led to the most recent Erasmus Mundus Master’s programme SE4GD – Software Engineers for Green Deal. This programme aims to integrate a sustainable mindset to the core software engineering education.
Biography
Jari Porras D.Sc (Tech) is a Professor of Software Engineering (especially Distributed Systems) at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT. Prof. Porras received the DSc. (Tech.) degree from the Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland, in 1998 about modeling and simulation of communication networks in distributed computing environment. He has supervised approx. 500 Master’s Thesis works and 22 Dissertations as well as acted as external evaluator for 21 doctoral thesis works since the start of his professorship. He has conducted research on parallel and distributed computing, wireless and mobile systems and services as well as sustainable ICT. In last years he has focused his research on human and sustainability aspects of software engineering. He is actively working in international networks and organizations.