Jürg Bargetze, The Influence of AI on Education; An Impact Analysis for Primary Schools in the Lehrplan 21 Area, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
Skills and competences are key natural resources in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Since artificial intelligence (AI) is penetrating more and more aspects of our lives, it is of paramount importance to understand the impact that it will have on our primary school system. The basis for this thesis is formed by literature and news research and is complemented by expert interviews. These elements are used to conduct a skill gap analysis supporting the creation of scenarios shaped by two drivers (development of AI and framework conditions).
The skills and competences included in the Lehrplan 21 and taught in reality, are mostly aligned with the need dictated by projections of the future. Teachers are mostly able to close the remaining gaps so far. Nevertheless, it is important to continuously update the curriculum according to the fast changing (digital) world and adapt a continuous education system updating fast eroding skills and competences. Additionally, software-based teaching and learning tools will become more important in training skills. Enabled by these tools, educators are able to individualise skill and competence training to a new extent.
To understand the real-life application of these opportunities discovered, a variety of insights from national pioneers, leading companies and education systems from Switzerland and Liechtenstein are linked to the research results as well as tools suggested by experts are presented. The combined insights are then used to form four sub-scenarios divided by the two drivers (development of AI and framework conditions). The respective scenarios were developed into two opposite directions (worst, best) and differently juxtaposed in opposition to show the spectrum of possible outcomes.
After a perceived lag of education behind the development of digital technology and specifically AI, this thesis on the contrary discovered a quite advanced and adaptive education system in the examined region. Due to the widely unknown impact of AI on the job market and our lives in general teaching must keep up with the fast-changing world around it and in certain cases add new competencies and especially tools to create the workforce of tomorrow. In the end, the competences of the teacher are key. |
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Maciej Lebiedz, Digitalization - Analysis of its Influence on Individual Time Use and Associated Impacts on the Environment, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Master's Thesis)
Digital transformation and climate change are two omnipresent and extremely important processes and challenges of the 21st century. In this thesis, the interplay of these phenomena will be studied based on the time-use approach. The aim of the first part of this thesis is to review studies that estimate the environmental impact per hour of everyday activities performed by individuals, evaluate how different approaches affect their findings and compare them. In the second part, the impact of digitalization on individual usage of time is examined, using time-use data and index that measures the progress of digitalization. In the third part of this thesis, the environmental impact of changes in people's behaviour that can be attributed to digitalization will be assessed based on qualitative literature research. |
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Juergen Reinhard, Gregor Wernet, Rainer Zah, Reinout Heijungs, Lorenz Hilty, Contribution-based prioritization of LCI database improvements: the most important unit processes in ecoinvent, International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, Vol. 24 (10), 2019. (Journal Article)
Improving the quality and quantity of unit process datasets in Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) databases affects every LCA they are used in. However, improvements in data quality and quantity are so far rather directed by the external supply of data and situation-driven requirements instead of systematic choices guided by structural dependencies in the data. Overall, the impact of current data updates on the quality of the LCI database remains unclear and maintenance efforts might be ineffective. This article analyzes how a contribution-based prioritization approach can direct LCI update efforts to datasets of key importance. |
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Lorenz Hilty, Weltretter 3.0. Drei Chancen für smarten Umweltschutz, Movum - Briefe zur Transformation, Vol. 2019 (25), 2019. (Journal Article)
Virtuelle Präsenz, Nahverkehr, Sekundärrohstoffe: Drei unterschätzte Chancen für Nachaltigkeit durch Digitalisierung |
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Andreas Gerber, Markus Ulrich, Patrick Wäger, Review of Haptic and Computerized(Simulation) Games on Climate Change, In: ISAGA conference. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
Develop a generic simulation game that allows finding and evaluating pathways towards possible future cities by showing, through numerical simulation, whether and how they respect physical (metabolic) constraints; by revealing, through playing the game, possible trade-offs between the goals of involved stakeholders. Apply the simulation game to explore pathways to the post-fossil "Swiss City 2050", a fictional built environment covering all Switzerland and sheltering 10 million people, including structures and services.
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Joachim Scholderer, Nina Veflen, Social norms and risk communication, Trends in Food Science & Technology, Vol. 84, 2019. (Journal Article)
Social norms are beliefs about what people in general would consider appropriate behaviour in a particular social context. In this mini-review, we summarise research on the role of social norms in the context of safe food handling practices. We review existing evidence regarding the influence of social norms on food handling practices related to cross-contamination and hygiene, time-temperature control and adequate cooking. Furthermore, we discuss the consequences of biases in social norms and how they might be mitigated by norm-oriented risk communication messages. Finally, we discuss potential conflicts between norms that are instrumental for safe food handling practices and norms that are instrumental for maintaining social relationships, and suggest directions for future research. |
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Maurus Dora, Use of Time: Theories and Application in the Age of Digitalisation, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Bachelor's Thesis)
The world is changing. Digitalisation affects every aspect of everyday life, as well as how we spend our time. Some activities are shortened, others need more time, certain activities change heavily, while a few disappear altogether.
But how is this measured? How can a day, a week, a year, or even the whole lifespan of a person be analysed? There are different theories from different disciplines to answer questions about the use of time.
This work is concerned with preparing these theories, contrasting and comparing them with each other. The main issue is which theory is suitable for answering which questions. These questions relate above all to the aforementioned effects of digitalisation.
Thus, this paper consists of three different parts:
1) Of the elaboration of the various theories in which they are described.
2) Of the comparison, in which basic assumptions and approaches are brought into relation with one another and commonalities and differences of the various theories are examined in relation to questions to which they can provide answers.
3) And finally, of the application of these questions to the already occurring and future possible changes in the use of time by digitalisation. Existing work on the effects of digitalisation on the respective field will be presented and reflected upon.
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Jeremy Kubrak, Videoconferencing at University of Zurich – Status Quo, Requirements, and Recommendations, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Bachelor's Thesis)
This thesis gathers available information about success factors of meetings, the impact of video conferencing(VC) on travel and travel habits in the university environment in order to create a concept for VC systems at the UZH with the goal to reduce travel induced greenhouse gas emissions by substituting face-to-face meetings with VC. Additionally to the theoretical information, interviews with average users were conducted to gather important requirements the proposed system has to meet. In order to directly compare the presented solutions with available solutions, the state analysis contains information about the currently used solutions. With the available information, the concept defines typical use cases in the higher education environment to further assign user roles to the use cases. The defined user roles clarify responsibilities and assign typical tasks to the respective role to supplement the concept. The concept moreover contains information about use case specific setups, such as hardware recommendations and positioning of the hardware. Since a change in behaviour can not only be achieved through a new VC system, further organisational measures have been described which may lead to an increased use of VC. |
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Joao Sa Vinhas Goncalves, Lorenz Hilty, Patrick Wäger, Multi-model Simulation Specification and Execution, In: SIMULTECH 2019 – 9th International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologied, Technologies and Applications. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
The Post-fossil Cities project aims at developing
a serious game that will enable stakeholders to
identify and test different trajectories from the
present state to carbon neutrality in a fictional
Swiss city. The game addresses both, natural
environment and societal constraints. |
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Pascal Blum, Lorenz Hilty, Wie klimaschädigend ist Videostreaming wirklich?, In: Tages Anzeiger, 25 July 2019. (Media Coverage)
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Lorenz Hilty, Lorenz Hilty, Funktionierende Systeme werden systematisch zu Abfall gemacht, In: Netzpolitik.org, 22 July 2019. (Media Coverage)
Jedes Jahr ein neues Gerät mit mehr Rechenleistung. Die Regel haben viele von uns verinnerlicht und wir produzieren dadurch Berge von Schrott. Doch Hardware und Software sind eigentlich sehr nachhaltige Produkte. Sie sollten so eingesetzt werden, dass wir den Material- und Ressourcenverbrauch endlich senken, schreibt der Informatiker Lorenz Hilty. |
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Jan Bieser, Visual Exploration of Time Use Data to Support Environmental Assessment of Lifestyles, In: 41st International Association for Time Use Research Conference, International Association for Time Use Research. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
The time-use (or activity) patterns individuals perform on a typical day – their individual lifestyles – fundamentally shape our society and the environment we live in. Not only are lifestyles evolving over time, driven by societal and technological change, they also significantly contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 12 “responsible consumption and production”, namely through the resource use and emissions associated with goods and services consumed to perform activities.
We created an interactive, browser-based tool to visualize and intuitively explore statistical time-use data. The visualization helps to gain an overview about the available data, identify and compare common time-use patterns and draw up hypotheses about the relationship between changes in lifestyles and their social and environmental consequences. As humans are good at visual perception, visualization of time-use data can help researchers to explore time-use data, attract a wider audience to time-use data and communicate time-use research to policy makers and the public.
We use the tool in a pilot application to compare time-use data from different regions, time periods as well as socio-economic and demographic backgrounds. From a time-use perspective, any technological change which triggers changes in time allocation can only be environmentally sustainable if the environmental impact of the total of the activities performed after the change is lower than before.
There is much potential to further improve the tool, i.e. directly including environmental data in the tool or improving the performance. We encourage researchers interested in time-use data to use this visualization and even add further functionality. |
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Gianluca Piga, Impacts of e-commerce on individual travel from a time-use perspective, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Bachelor's Thesis)
Since 1990, GHG emissions caused by the transport sector have continuously increased and in 2014 cause 15% of global GHG emissions. A major driver of this rise is the increasing demand for individual travel (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014). One of the most common trip purposes and thus also a driver for travel is shopping (UK Department for Transport,2015). A continuously running survey of the European statistical office, Eurostat, shows that an average German person who is between 20 and 74 years old spends on average 35 minutes per day on shopping and 48 percent of respondents said that they shopped on survey days (Eurostat, 2010).
Many studies argue that the prevalence of e-commerce reduces individual travel as physical shopping trips are avoided. On the other hand, there are studies which contradict these results and claim that it is not possible to make a general claim in this respect, especially in those situations where a shopping trip is linked to trips with other trip purposes such as shopping after work. Empirical studies show that individual travel for shopping purposes is declining. For example, the number of shopping trips per person and year in the UK declined from 216 trips in 2002 to 177 trips in 2015 (UK Department for Transport, 2015). While e-commerce has the potential to avoid dedicated shopping trips (e.g. a shopping tour consisting of a single trip from home to the grocery store and back), trips with several trip purposes might not be avoided (e.g. a stop at the grocery store on the way home from work; trip purposes are commuting and shopping).
In this thesis, I investigate impacts of e-commerce on shopping behavior, activity patterns and the potential of e-commerce to avoid shopping-related trips. To do so, I use time-use data provided by the Multinational Time-Use Study (MTUS) to identify typical activity sequences involving shopping and individual travel (e.g. the activities performed before and after shopping), considering differences in demographic and socio-economic characteristics of individuals and time-horizons. Using the activity sequences, I evaluate the potential of e-commerce to avoid or reduce travel. Thereby, I will consider differences in trip purposes (e.g. shopping, work, shopping and work), and also differences in shopping purposes (e.g. buying groceries, shopping for leisure).
Results show that e-shoppers and non-e-shoppers differ in terms of their demographic characteristics, shopping activities, and individual travel behavior. E-shoppers spend more time on shopping and individual travel in terms of trip frequency in comparison to non-e-shoppers, which leads to a limited potential of e-shopping to save individual travel. |
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Majurikka Sivanantham, Vergleich verschiedener Suchmaschinen hinsichtlich Datenschutz und Suchqualität, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Bachelor's Thesis)
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Bodo Brägger, Green VVZ, University of Zurich, Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics, 2019. (Bachelor's Thesis)
The result of this applied bachelor thesis is the analysis, extension and reworking of the web application built in the bachelor thesis Nachhaltigkeits-Vorlesungsverzeichnis by Lukas Grässle [Grässle, 2018].
The objective is to provide a dynamically generated list of courses related to sustainability topics, based on the course catalogue of the University of Zurich (UZH). The web application is hosted on a server provided by the UZH Department of Informatics and a public view will be embedded into a webpage of the UZH Sustainability team. It also features private views for administration of the modules and the keywords provided for the course catalogue search.
The purpose of this project is to rework and improve the previous tool and extend it by certain crucial features:
- Filtering modules according to study program
- Viewing courses of previous semesters
- Adding modules via automated recommendations based on the keyword search, for terms in titles, descriptions, or names of instructors, both for modules directly and for modules containing matching courses
- Comprehensive code documentation for reusability and extensibility
The importance of documentation is stressed, to make maintenance and further extension easier - as well as comprehensive user guides to make the tool accessible without additional training. |
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Andreas Gerber, Post-fossil Cities, In: EPSF 2019. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
The 21st century is expected to become the century of the cities, with urban spaces being the central organizational form of society. Reaching the goals of the Agenda 2030 and of the Paris Agreement will
require an active design ("Gestaltung") of the transformation to future cities. |
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Lorenz Hilty, Video-Streaming ist weit weniger klimabelastend als Fliegen, In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, p. 9, 14 June 2019. (Newspaper Article)
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Maria Pouri, Lorenz Hilty, Conceptualizing the Digital Sharing Economy in the Context of Sustainability, In: ICT4S 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
Human society is increasingly influencing the planet and its environmental systems. The existing environmental problems indicate that current production and consumption patterns are not sustainable. Despite the remarkable opportunities brought about by Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to improve the resource efficiency of production and consumption processes, it seems that the overall trend is still not heading towards sustainability. By promoting the utilization of available and underused resources, the ICT-enabled sharing economy has transformed, and even in some cases disrupted, the prevailing patterns of production and consumption, raising questions about opportunities and risks of shared consumption modes for sustainability. The present article attempts to conceptualize the sustainability implications of today’s sharing economy. We begin with presenting a definition for the digital sharing economy that embraces the common features of its various forms. Based on our proposed definition, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the digital sharing economy as a use case of ICT. The analysis is deepened by applying the life-cycle/enabling/structural impacts model of ICT effects to this use case. As a result, we show the various positive and negative potentials of digital sharing for sustainability at different system levels. While it is too early to project well-founded scenarios to describe the sustainability status of digital sharing, the implications discussed in our work may help outlining future research and policies in this area. |
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Maria Pouri, Lorenz Hilty, First Workshop on Digitally Enabled Sharing and Sustainability (DESS), In: ICT4S 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability. 2019. (Conference Presentation)
The ICT-enabled sharing economy is a prime example of the force of digital transformation. New forms of sharing can change patterns of consumption, social relationships, and economic structures. Participating in the digital sharing economy is becoming increasingly interesting and more effective
in the eyes of its users. The effects of this new trend may be positive or negative from a sustainable development perspective. For example, the digital sharing economy can promote efficient resource consumption (improved utilization) by enabling the shared use of available resources. Moreover, it can have positive social and economic effects as it connects people and enables them to become economic actors in their social bonds.
However, from an environmental perspective, affordable, easy-to-access, and convenient services in the sharing economy may cancel out the system’s savings and efficiencies by rebound effects and hence cause new environmental problems. From a social point of view, it is important to investigate whether the digital sharing economy contributes to providing a decent life for its participants – or to poor working conditions and other social issues. Questions of sustainability-related contributions or issues of digital sharing are not thoroughly resolved or even identified yet. Sharpening and discussing such questions will assist us in understanding the long-term potentials of the digital sharing economy, whether positive or negative, to change people's lives and the global environment as well. |
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Jan Bieser, David Haas, Lorenz Hilty, VETUS – Visual Exploration of Time Use Data to Support Environmental Assessment of Lifestyles, In: 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, CEUR-WS, 2019-06-10. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
The time-use (or activity) patterns individuals perform on a typical day – their individual lifestyles – fundamentally shape our society and the environment we live in. Not only are lifestyles evolving over time, driven by societal and technological change, they also significantly contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 12 “responsible consumption and production”, namely through the resource use and emissions associated with goods and services consumed to perform activities. We created an interactive, browser-based tool to visualize and intuitively explore statistical time-use data. The visualization helps to gain an overview about the available data, identify and compare common time-use patterns and draw up hypotheses about the relationship between changes in lifestyles and their social and environmental consequences. We use the tool to compare time-use data from different regions, time periods as well as socio-economic and demographic backgrounds and estimate the associated energy consumption. From a time-use perspective, any technological change which triggers changes in time allocation can only be environmentally sustainable if the environmental impact of the total of the activities performed after the change is lower than before. |
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