July 11, 2013 –
Ross: “We think we’ll be able to give the state of California more understanding about the enabling rate, both at home and at work, and some of the factors that go into this.”
The seven undergraduate students in this summer’s SURF-IT (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Information Technology) program are learning by doing. They’re rolling up their sleeves and tacking real research projects under the guidance of UC Irvine faculty and graduate students.
They’re also learning by listening. This week’s lunchtime seminar featured an inside look at an ongoing research project directed by CALIT2’s Stuart Ross, who also serves as SURF-IT’s co-director. The project, sponsored by CALIT2 and the California Energy Commission, seeks to understand how computer users navigate their machines’ power-management features.
Understanding the energy used by computers is a huge – but important – undertaking, Ross told the audience. Even though individual desktop and laptop computers consume only the energy of a couple of light bulbs, there are about 130 million of the machines in use in homes alone, accounting for about three percent of energy consumption nationwide. “This is not a trivial problem. It is worth paying attention to,” he said.
Many previous studies have been conducted, Ross told the group, but the topic is complex and hard to pin down. Researchers agree on broad issues — people don’t use their power-saving modes enough and this dilemma needs to be addressed — but there’s little consensus on exact data, the behaviors that are most important, and how those behaviors might be predicted. Some studies have monitored actual energy use and some have surveyed users or managers; some have covered large populations and some have covered small groups. Most of the studies have focused on workplace computers, omitting home computer usage completely.
“That’s one of the motivations of our study,” Ross continued. “Workplace usage is important but doesn’t account for all computer usage. Nobody in this room has a typical 8-5 schedule [for using his/her computer].”
The UCI study is structured for easy replication by other colleges and universities.
The CALIT2 project is a survey that focuses on users, their computers and their usage habits, both at work and at home: how often they use the machines, for what purposes, whether they turn them off or put them to sleep when they’re not in use, and what explains differences in these behaviors.
The team is looking for behaviors that affect the “enabling rate” – the percentage of people who actually engage their computers’ low power features. The task is complicated by the many designations in use for these power-saving modes: “sleep,” “standby,” “hibernation” and “low power” to name a few.
More than 7,200 surveys were sent to uci.edu domain addresses, and more than 25 percent have been completed to date – a respectable return, said Ross, adding that responses will be accepted for another week or two. Survey respondents receive a $5 Amazon gift card as a thank you.
Ross emphasized the exploratory nature of the project. It’s not an attempt to test a predisposed hypothesis. “It’s messier than that,” he said. Rather, the survey is an effort to understand the variables that could be affecting user behavior.
Ross commented that a university is a good place to conduct this type of survey. In addition to offering easily identifiable email address domains, universities are home to a wide variety of ages, occupations, and ethnicities that could provide clues to computer usage behaviors.
Additionally, Ross and survey manager Joy Pixley, and their team, structured the survey in such a way that it can be replicated easily by other universities, allowing for result comparisons.
Developing the survey was not without its challenges. Deciding on the appropriate questions, writing and rewriting them to make them understandable and easy to answer, and pre-testing took weeks of team time. So did gaining approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board, which monitors all human subject studies.
Still on the team’s to-do list: data cleaning and analysis, another review of published literature on the subject and later this summer, an informal report to the California Energy Commission. Next spring the group will submit its final report.
“We think we’ll be able to give the state of California more understanding of the enabling rate, both at home and at work, and some of the factors that go into this,” Ross concluded.
— Anna Lynn Spitzer
