Manning CICS Helps Shape Inaugural ACM Sustainability Week

Manning CICS faculty and students contributed research on computational decarbonization, energy-efficient systems, workload optimization, and sustainable infrastructure.

August 11, 2026
Research
Banff, Alberta, Canada

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) helped shape the inaugural Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Sustainability Week in June 2026, with faculty serving in leadership roles and researchers contributing seven papers on using computing to advance sustainable energy systems. 

Around 300 researchers gathered in Banff, Alberta, Canada, for workshops, poster sessions, and discussions as the ACM e-Energy and ACM BuildSys conferences united under one event for the first time. 

“Computing is at the center of addressing challenges to energy systems and sustainability,” said David Irwin, professor and associate department head of electrical and computer engineering at the Riccio College of Engineering, Manning CICS adjunct professor, and chair of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Energy Systems and Informatics (SIGEnergy), which hosted Sustainability Week. “Of course, rising energy demand from AI data centers is an emerging and important research topic ... but computing is also critical more broadly to optimizing society's increasingly complex energy system.” 

Both ACM e-Energy and ACM BuildSys explore research that applies computational techniques to optimize energy systems and energy use while reducing carbon emissions, but they approach these challenges from different angles. According to Irwin, ACM e-Energy emphasizes optimizing the energy “network,” including power generation, transmission, and distribution systems, while ACM BuildSys focuses on optimizing the energy “edge”—the buildings, cities, and transportation systems that consume energy. 

“A key goal in co-locating the conferences at a new ACM Sustainability Week event was to expose both communities to a wider range of perspectives and approaches,” Irwin said.  

The combined format brought researchers from the two conference communities to joint workshops, while paper submissions increased around 30% compared with previous years, according to Irwin. 

The new event approach also brought changes to some of the paper review processes. At ACM e-Energy, the changes addressed a long-standing challenge in its review process stemming from the conference’s interdisciplinary nature, according to Associate Professor Mohammad Hajiesmaili, who served as an ACM e-Energy 2026 program co-chair. Hajiesmaili and his fellow organizers created dedicated methodological tracks—systems, learning, theory, and control—each led by chairs with expertise in that area. 

“Organizing submissions by methodology helped us assign papers to the right experts and significantly improve the quality of the review process,” Hajiesmaili said. 

Survey feedback from both reviewers and paper authors indicated that the new approach substantially improved the review experience. Based on that feedback, Hajiesmaili said, the methodology-based track structure will become the conference’s default review process moving forward.  

Beyond behind-the-scenes work, Manning CICS faculty and students contributed research exploring topics such as computational decarbonization, energy-efficient systems, workload optimization, and sustainable infrastructure.  

Doctoral student Diptyaroop Maji was first author on a paper presented at ACM e-Energy titled “CarbonX: An Open-Source Tool for Computational Decarbonization Using Time Series Foundation Models.” Co-authored with Distinguished Professor Prashant Shenoy, Associate Dean of Educational Programs and Teaching and Distinguished Professor Ramesh Sitaraman, and UCLA researchers Kang Yang and Mani Srivastava, the paper introduces CarbonX, an open-source tool that forecasts electricity grid carbon intensity, enabling the design of energy systems that shift flexible workloads to cleaner locations or times. 

"Accurate forecasts of carbon intensity—which is the carbon emitted per unit of electricity generated—can help flexible workloads, such as electric-vehicle charging, battery storage, and many machine learning workloads operate when and where electricity is cleaner,” Maji said. 

Maji said the in-person experience created opportunities for conversations that are difficult to replicate through remote interactions.  

“Presenting CarbonX in person was especially rewarding because it gave me the opportunity to discuss the work with researchers approaching sustainability from many different directions,” Maji said.  

Irwin said that sustainability topics are typically not part of a core undergraduate computer science education. Events like Sustainability Week, he said, help demonstrate to younger scholars the impact their research could have on the real world. 

“Enabling early-career researchers to engage with the larger sustainability community can be important in broadening their view of computing research and the types of problems where computing research can make a real difference in improving our society,” he said.  

Manning CICS Research at ACM Sustainability Week 2026 

Manning CICS faculty and students contributed research across both ACM e-Energy and ACM BuildSys, including: 

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