Systems Matter Seminar | Sustainable Autonomous Things: Exploring the Nexus of Computing, Engineering, and Materials for Climate Resilience

As the Internet of Things (IoT) expands towards a future of a trillion interconnected devices, traditional battery-powered, monolithic, and general-purpose systems are proving unsustainable and environmentally burdensome. Unfortunately, threats from climate change necessitate quickly scalable and robust technological solutions for everything from extreme flooding to ecosystem assessment and even carbon monitoring. To meet this gap, we must reimagine new types of computing and sensing devices, integrating and translating (often old-fashioned) ideas and methods from multiple fields to build something new and valuable. In this talk, Hester will introduce several platforms that represent this shift in thinking – including soil-powered computers, soft biohybrid robots, battery-free wearables and implantables, and carbon-aware edge devices. Hester will delve into the challenges and promise of integration and the real-world impacts of these projects, highlighting how we can harness these advancements to address pressing global challenges such as climate change. Finally, Hester will emphasize the importance of community-engaged research in driving effective and long-term technology solutions and how community inputs and co-design have guided his work. 

Josiah Hester holds the Allchin Chair and is Associate Professor of Interactive Computing and Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He leads the newly formed Center for Advancing Responsible Computing (CARE) at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Hester was previously at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor. He works in sustainable computing and health technologies broadly. He applies his work to health wearables and implantable bioelectronics, large-scale sensing for sustainability and conservation, and resilient robotic platforms, supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, ARPA-H, and the Department of Defense. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science, won his NSF CAREER, and a VMware Early Career Grant in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has received seven Best Paper type Awards, five Design awards, and seven Best Presentation type Awards, and been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.