To halt further climate change, computing, along with the rest of society, must reduce, and eventually eliminate, its carbon emis- sions. Recently, many researchers have focused on estimating and optimizing computing’s embodied carbon, i.e., from manufactur- ing computing infrastructure, in addition to its operational carbon, i.e., from executing computations, primarily because the former is much larger than the latter but has received less research attention. Focusing attention on embodied carbon is important because it can incentivize i) operators to increase their infrastructure’s efficiency and lifetime and ii) downstream suppliers to reduce their own op- erational carbon, which represents upstream companies’ embodied carbon. Yet, as we discuss, focusing attention on embodied car- bon may also introduce harmful incentives, e.g., by significantly overstating real carbon reductions and complicating the incentives for directly optimizing operational carbon. This position paper’s purpose is to mitigate such harmful incentives by highlighting both the promise and potential pitfalls of optimizing embodied carbon.
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Considering the Corporeal to Facilitate Research to Practice Transitions
The authors suggest that the research-to-practice gap, such as that found in evidence-based management, is due in part to a lack of attention to embodied knowledge. The recommendation is for change agents to bring attention to embodied knowing when implementing change based on research. Three approaches for introducing increased corporeal understanding are proposed. These include embracing the embrained body including attending to kinesthetic resistance, exploring what research means for intersectional bodies, and working with corporeal metaphors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1760585
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10292631
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Academy of Management annual meeting proceedings
- ISSN:
- 2151-6561
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Drawing on linguistic and biocultural anthropological perspectives on embodiment, this paper advances a “biolinguistic” approach to ethnographic research on intimacy, attending simultaneously to the co‐constitutive interactive, psychophysiological, and phenomenological processes that emerge in everyday embodied interaction between long‐term, cohabitating romantic partners. Through concurrent attention to natural interactions captured during video ethnography and moment‐to‐moment shifts in heart‐rate variability, this study complements and complicates existing psychological, communication, and anthropological research on intimacy. Three case‐studies of long‐term couples residing in the Southeastern United States demonstrate how neither pure psychophysiology nor pure linguistic analysis fully encapsulates potential patterns of intimacy among them. Rather, this microanalytical, biolinguistic approach to the complexities of body and language interplay, in treating embodiment and interaction as bidirectional phenomena, emphasizes that meanings and enactments of intimacy might look different for each couple and can change over time in complex ways that index couples’ enduring orientations towards various cultural and relational norms.
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null (Ed.)Making as a term has gained attention in the educational field. It signals many different meanings to many different groups, yet is not clearly defined. This project’s researchers refer to making as a term that bears social and cultural impact but with a broader more sociocultural association than definitions that center making in STEM learning. Using the theoretical lenses of critical relationality and embodiment, our research team position curriculum as a set of locally situated activities that are culturally, linguistically, socially, and politically influenced. We argue that curriculum emerges from embodied making experiences in specific interactions with learners and their communities. This study examines multiple ways of learning within and across seven community-based organizations who are engaged directly or indirectly in making activities that embedded literacy, STEM, peace, and the arts. Using online ethnography, the research team adopted a multiple realities perspective that positions curriculum as dynamic, flexible, and evolving based on the needs of a community, its ecosystems, and the wider environment. The research team explored making and curricula through a qualitative analysis of interviews with community organizers and learners. The findings provide thick descriptions of making activities which reconceptualize making and curriculum as living and responsive to community needs. Implications of this study expand and problematize the field’s understanding of making, curriculum, and learning environments.more » « less
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Building embodied intelligent agents that can interact with 3D indoor environments has received increasing research attention in recent years. While most works focus on single-object or agent-object visual functionality and affordances, our work proposes to study a new kind of visual relationship that is also important to perceive and model -- inter-object functional relationships (e.g., a switch on the wall turns on or off the light, a remote control operates the TV). Humans often spend little or no effort to infer these relationships, even when entering a new room, by using our strong prior knowledge (e.g., we know that buttons control electrical devices) or using only a few exploratory interactions in cases of uncertainty (e.g., multiple switches and lights in the same room). In this paper, we take the first step in building AI system learning inter-object functional relationships in 3D indoor environments with key technical contributions of modeling prior knowledge by training over large-scale scenes and designing interactive policies for effectively exploring the training scenes and quickly adapting to novel test scenes. We create a new benchmark based on the AI2Thor and PartNet datasets and perform extensive experiments that prove the effectiveness of our proposed method. Results show that our model successfully learns priors and fast-interactive-adaptation strategies for exploring inter-object functional relationships in complex 3D scenes. Several ablation studies further validate the usefulness of each proposed module.more » « less
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Over the past two decades, there has been a significant increase in the production of engineering education research. Worldwide, this increase is reflected in the growing number of papers that are submitted to engineering education-focused conferences; engineering education-focused journal outlets; and the increasing number of new schools and departments of engineering education, and tenure-track faculty positions opening up in the United States. In spite of these developments, it is often argued that there remains a gap between engineering education research and educational practice. Some studies attribute this gap to a focus on the dissemination of evidence-based practices, as opposed to working with instructors to adapt evidence-based practices to “fit” into new contexts (Froyd et al., 2017). Other research points to the need for broader cultural change, for example at the level of the school or department, in order to create the conditions that enable and encourage instructors to sustainably engage with scholarly teaching and learning practices (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011). In this paper, we describe a novel institutional model, currently embodied in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) at the University of Georgia (UGA), which is designed to create such conditions (Morelock, Walther, & Sochacka, 2019). Philosophically, our model is based on a propagation (versus a dissemination) paradigm (Froyd et al., 2017), grounded in a strengths (Saleebey, 2012) (versus a deficit) approach to existing instructional capacity, and broadly informed by complex systems theory (Laszlo, 1996; Meadows & Wright, 2008). Practically, the model leverages ecological design principles (Hemenway, 2009) to inform the day-to-day operations of the effort. This paper describes these philosophical and practical underpinnings and investigates the following research question: How can ecological design principles be operationalized to cultivate a culture of innovative and scholarly teaching and learning in a college of engineering?more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2021.16406abstract
