Balancing Software Efficiency and Environmental Impact

The recent developments in the research area of software frugality and continuous integration have shown a significant shift towards addressing environmental impact and enhancing the efficiency of software deployment processes. Researchers are increasingly focusing on measuring and mitigating the energy consumption of continuous integration pipelines, particularly in data centers, which have a substantial environmental footprint. This trend is driven by the need to balance the acceleration of software development with global energy consumption concerns. Additionally, there is a growing emphasis on automating the publication of research software with rich metadata, adhering to FAIR principles, and extending these practices to various research software infrastructures. This automation not only streamlines the publication process but also ensures that software is published with comprehensive metadata, enhancing its discoverability and reusability. Furthermore, advancements in language-agnostic models for assessing source reliability on platforms like Wikipedia highlight the importance of combating disinformation across multiple language editions. These models leverage editorial activity data to evaluate source reliability within diverse and controversial topics, contributing to content verifiability and reliability across different language communities.

Noteworthy papers include one that provides a large-scale analysis of the energy footprint of CI pipelines using GitHub Actions, revealing significant aggregated energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Another paper introduces HERMES, a tool automating software publication with rich metadata, showcasing its extensibility through plugin architecture and preliminary case studies. Lastly, a paper presents a language-agnostic model for assessing source reliability on Wikipedia, achieving high predictive performance across various languages and resource levels.

Sources

Software Frugality in an Accelerating World: the Case of Continuous Integration

Extending and Applying Automated HERMES Software Publication Workflows

Language-Agnostic Modeling of Source Reliability on Wikipedia

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