After a long presentation roadshow, which touched upon several Italian universities in 2023, the first edition of the Digital Sustainability Award has come to an end. An Award dedicated to the best degree theses on digital sustainability, the one devised by the Foundation for Digital Sustainability in collaboration with the EHT Group, created to promote the culture of Digital Sustainability among university students entering the world of work, and which on 18 April, in the setting of the Digital Sustainability Day – the Foundation’s annual event – saw the awarding of prizes to the three best candidates selected by the jury composed of professors Alberto Marinelli (Sapienza University of Rome), Tiziana Catarci (Sapienza University of Rome) and Lara Lazzeroni (University of Siena). “Engaging and retaining talented young people in our country,” said Emanuele Spampinato, Chairman of the EHT Group, “is crucial for the future of a sector of Italian excellence such as innovation, but not only. With this project that we are pursuing as a partner of the Foundation for Digital Sustainability, the world of business dialogues with that of the university on a topic such as the relationship between technology and sustainability, which are and will be in the coming years the keywords of strategies and business visions with which young people will have to deal“.
More specifically, the initiative envisaged a prize of €2,500 for the three best theses – identified respectively in the categories best master‘s thesis, best doctoral thesis, and best “ICT women’s thesis” – as well as, for the first classified, the opportunity to carry out a job shadowing course at EHT and the companies in its consortium. All this with the aim of bringing students closer to Digital Sustainability, starting from the firm conviction that they can – and must – be the first and most important supporters of a topic that is as complex as it is crucial for the future of our country and our companies. “Digital and Sustainability: a pair, the sum of two individual entities that together form a systemic vision,” commented Luciano Guglielmi, Director of the Foundation’s Steering Committee. “Rewarding young people who understand the power of such a combination was an honour and a pleasure. But the most fascinating thing has been to discover how this combination is not the prerogative of a single discipline, but potentially embraces every branch of knowledge and can find application in every activity of our lives: a fact demonstrated by the heterogeneity of the subjects covered by the almost 200 master’s and doctoral theses that took part“.
Best Master’s Thesis
With a dissertation entitled “DIGITAL ECOSOFSYSTEMS: Philosophy, Ecology, Technology“, the winner in the Best Master’s Thesis category is Chiara Parlanti, PhD in Contemporary Political Philosophy at the University of Roma Tre. The thesis, which was awarded for its depth and breadth, tackles a topical and urgent issue such as the need for a sort of epistemic turning point in the method of analysing contemporary challenges, straddling ‘technologies’ and ‘humanities’, finding a brilliant synthesis between artificial intelligence, climate change and social and health emergencies.
“When I am asked what prompted me to write a thesis on sustainability, it is spontaneous for me to think of a precise moment when I realised that the strong state of malaise that afflicted me was due to ecological anxiety,” commented Chiara Parlanti. “Noticing the common indifference in the face of the socio-environmental crisis that is leading to the sixth mass extinction, and learning that the WHO itself declares that there is nothing more that can be done than to mitigate and adapt to this state of affairs – which would be followed by conflicts, migrations and numerous human and non-human losses – caused me profound anguish. I then learned that there are people in the Amazon who say they have experienced ‘the fall of heaven’, the end of the world, numerous times already. This led me to want to visit the Brazilian Amazon in order to understand how and if, in our time, it is possible to experience and thus overcome the end of the world‘.
Best Doctoral Thesis
“Smartcruise destinations: an innovative network approach in the management of connections between cruise tourism, tourist destinations and the territory“: this is the title of the winning thesis in the Best Doctoral Thesis category, written by Dr. Sara Carciotti for her PhD programme in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture (Trieste-Udine University). The work deals with the issue of the sustainability of Mediterranean port-cities in order to ensure the proper valorisation of both the right to tourism and the right to an orderly and effective development of the places of destination for cruise tourism, exposing the advantages and opportunities related to the use of a technological platform that aims at achieving this union and ensures an innovative network design of tourist cities.
“The constant need for labels, such as ‘sustainable tourism’, ‘responsible tourism’, immediately reveals the existence of a problem related to the impact that the tourism industry can have on the territory and society,” said Sara Carciotti. “So far, in many tourist destinations, the valorisation of the economic aspects of the tourism phenomenon has prevailed over the need to safeguard the urban environment, the natural environment and people by promoting actions that are unrelated to each other. A thesis that speaks of tourism cannot exempt itself from an all-round vision of sustainability, and digital technology, if used responsibly, can be the tool that helps the territory keep the three components of sustainability (environmental, social, economic) in balance. The management of tourist flows in port cities, through an integrated supply and demand management model, can enable the transition from uncontrolled tourism growth to a circular development of the tourist destination and in a broader sense of the territory. The model, through the use of ICT technologies, makes it possible to improve the well-being of the resident in the destination, increase tourist satisfaction with the tourist experience, respect the territory from a sustainable perspective, use the network to create new opportunities, increase the economic value of the destination, and increase the positive impact on the activities of the stakeholders that are part of it‘.
Best Thesis “Women ICT
The winner in the Best ICT Women’s Thesis category was a thesis entitled ‘Sensors and Wearable-based Activity Recognition and Behaviour Analysis for Users’ Quality of Life Improvement‘, written by Dr. Francesca Marcello for her PhD in Electronic and Computer Engineering at the University of Cagliari. Specifically, the thesis focused on analysing how the recognition and monitoring, by means of wearable devices, of human beings’ activities can be used to improve their quality of life, supporting through three concrete use cases the validity of this general idea.
“The decision to focus on Digital Sustainability for my thesis was mainly driven by an interest in environmental issues,” commented Francesca Marcello. “I was driven by the desire to actively contribute to the research and implementation of green and sustainable solutions in my field of interest, ICT, with the idea that they would not remain just theoretical reflections, but could have a tangible impact on the environment and people. The responsible use of technologies will help to foster a balance between human needs and the preservation of the environment, a crucial goal to ensure the well-being of all, individuals and ecosystem, now and for future generations‘.
Having concluded the first edition of the Award, however, our gaze is already turned to the future: in fact, considering the great participation – with almost 200 candidate theses – the goal of the Foundation for Digital Sustainability and EHT is to continue with the initiative, launching a second edition for 2025.