In 2015, the United Nations formulated the SDGs, ideally to be achieved by 2030, as a ‘shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet now and in the future’. No poverty (SDG 1), zero hunger (SDG 2), reduced income inequality (SDG 10) and climate action (SDG 13) are four of the goals. The complete list the 17 SDGs.

The SDGs can be divided into three categories: sustainable society, sustainable economy and sustainable planet, and for each category we will provide examples of how ongoing research at the Informatics Institute contributes to various goals.

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that, according to our mission, we also conduct fundamental, curiosity-driven research that does not directly connect to any of the SDGs, but does contribute to the building blocks of informatics as a science and thus automatically to the building blocks of the digital society of the future.

Sustainable society

The research of Debraj Roy of the Computational Science Lab (CSL) and his collaborators focuses directly on the first three SDGs: no poverty, zero hunger, and good health and well-being. They use a unique computational model to study poverty in greater detail and with much fewer assumptions than traditional macroeconomic models do. 

Francesco Regazzoni of the Complex Cyber Infrastructure (CCI) group, leads the European project SECURED which aims to scale up techniques for anonymization, collaborative computation and synthetic generation of health data so that they can safely be used in medical applications.

In education the FACT-AI course, short for ‘Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality and Transparency in AI’, makes students aware of the societal problems that can arise in the application of AI algorithms. The course teaches them how to apply state-of-the-art algorithmic approaches to attenuate those problems and thus contributes to making AI algorithms more inclusive for everybody.

Sustainable economy

Chrysa Papagianni of the Multiscale Networked Systems (MNS) group is the project coordinator of a three-year European project on the system architecture for future 6G mobile networks. 6G networks should not only meet the performance requirements where 5G systems fall short, but also create new technologies and transform further the existing business models and roles in the mobile networks ecosystem.

Christof Monz leads the Language and Technology Lab (LTL), which focusses on machine translation, question-answering systems, summarizing documents and on non-toxic language generation. Developing language technology for smaller languages, for which automatic translation machines like Google Translate or DeepL don’t work, is an important part of what the lab does.

Sustainable planet

Although computer science can contribute to reaching the SDGs, it is also estimated that by 2030, as much as 21% of global energy consumption will be required for all the world’s IT-applications. Anuj Pathania of the Parallel Computing Systems (PCS) group, is leading the Energy Labels-project which aims to to quantify the energy consumption of digital services and develop energy labels that tell whether a digital service consumes much or little energy. Ultimately, the researchers want to use these energy labels to send data and computations to places where more green energy is available, thus reducing the carbon footprint of IT-applications.

Finally, we mention the ROBUST-programme which is supported by NWO with €25 million and operates under the auspices of their Long-Term Programme scheme. ROBUST aims to develop AI-algorithms that advance the state of the art in accuracy, reliability, repeatability, resilience and safety. The programme specifically aims to contribute to the UN’s sustainable development goals.