Dr. Jonathan Koomey, Consulting Professor, Stanford University

Abstract: Long-standing trends in the energy efficiency of computing and communications, combined with ever increasingly clever ways to harvest ambient energy (light, motion, or heat), promise to make ultra low-power mobile sensors and controls ubiquitous. Harvesting background energy flows opens up the possibility of mobile computing devices operating indefinitely with no external power source, and that means an explosion of available data from almost every device on our planet. These developments highlight the promise of what Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor of management at MIT, calls “nanodata,” or customized fine-grained data describing in detail the characteristics of individuals, transactions, and information flows. This talk will describe the driving forces behind these trends and present real-world examples illustrating their implications for our ability to understand and respond to the world around us.

Speaker Bio: Jonathan Koomey is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University, worked for more than two decades at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University (2003-4 and Fall 2008), Yale University (Fall 2009), and UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group (Fall 2011). Dr. Koomey holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and an A.B. in History of Science from Harvard University. He is the author or coauthor of ten books and more than 150 articles and reports. He’s also one of the leading international experts on the economics of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the effects of information technology on resource use. He is the author of Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving, which has been translated into Chinese, Italian, and (soon) Korean, and Cold Cash, Cool Climate: Science-Based Advice for Ecological Entrepreneurs (both from Analytics Press).