Mobile Computing to Support Sustainability Aharon Abadi IBM Research – Haifa Israel aharona@il.ibm.com Lori Flynn CERT, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA USA lflynn@cert.org Aaron Gordon Metropolitan State University Denver, CO USA aaronjg@mac.com Jeff Gray University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, AL USA gray@cs.ua.edu Abstract This report documents the Mobile Sustainability activity that was facilitated at the end of the Workshop on Mobile Development Lifecycle (MobileDeLi), in conjunction with SPLASH 2015. The workshop attendees were presented with several discussion questions and were charged with the task of listing the challenges in Mobile Sustainability. Participants were asked to outline a research agenda that could address the core challenges. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.13 [Reusable Software]: Domain engineering General Terms Mobile Sustainability, Mobile Energy, Mobile Software Engineering Keywords Mobile devices, App Development 1. Activity Introduction The Mobile Sustainability activity was a 90 minute activity that was facilitated at the end of the Workshop on Mobile Development Lifecycle (MobileDeLi). There were 40 attendees in the workshop across the day and about 30 participants were engaged in this final activity. The main goal was to collaborate on identifying the challenges in mobile sustainability and suggest a research agenda to deal with the significant challenges. The activity encouraged personal reflection, group work, artifacts presentation, and open discussion. The guidelines that were stated before starting the activity encouraged a diversity of opinions to initiate collaboration within the constraints of a time-boxed activity. Lori Flynn introduced the activity, and spoke about how the topic of “Mobile Computing to Support Sustainability” can be considered from several perspective: mobile device energy use, mobile devices used as an integrator for sustainability, and reuse/recycling of mobile devices. Mobile device energy use is one aspect of sustainability. Device manufacturers and operating system providers compete to provide energy efficient devices, because consumers want their devices to continue to work despite time passing (and possibly device use) since last recharge. For instance, the Android Doze system manages the behavior of all apps running on Android 6.0 or higher, saving power by performing much less background CPU and network activity if it detects that a device has been left unattended for a period of time, by using significant motion detection. Android versions 6.0 and higher also include App Standby, which determines if an app is not being actively used, and then puts the app into standby state until the device is plugged into a power supply or the user activates it [1]. Apple’s iOS 9 has a Low Power Mode which can be used to save energy, and iOS 9 devices use light and proximity sensors to determine if the device is laying face down; and then if so, stop the screen from turning on [2]. Solar energy smartphone chargers are marketed for green power [3], and a local or large-scale energy grid could use green power to charge mobile devices, but as yet there is no green power solution built into mobile devices. Mobile devices can be used to integrate systems and activities supporting sustainability. For instance, mobile devices with GPS are used with mapping applications such as Google Maps (e.g., Mass Transit [4], Bicycling [5], and Walking [6]), for easier mass transit use, and safe bicycling and walking directions. By making these sustainable methods of transportation easy to use, mobile devices support green transportation. Mobile devices are used to support farmers in developing regions, helping them to remotely perform irrigation control and to obtain agriculture pricing information [7]. In these ways, mobile devices support a sustainable economy and food supply. Healthcare support could also be considered as affecting economic and societal sustainability, for instance if one Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. MobileDeLi'15, October 25-30, 2015, Pittsburgh, PA, USA © 2015 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-3906-3/15/10…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2846661.2846675 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. MobileDeLi’15, October 26, 2015, Pittsburgh, PA, USA c  2015 ACM. 978-1-4503-3906-3/15/10...$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2846661.2846675 54