Nivedita Arora

Current developments in wearables and body sensors have largely overlooked measuring the risk of eye damage due to UV radiation. This work addresses that gap by designing smart glasses capable of measuring UV exposure directly incident on the eyes. Leveraging a UV sensor by AMS-Osram and a compact ESP32S3 microcontroller, our prototype collects UVA/B/C data in real time. We developed a data pipeline to convert raw sensor output into spectral irradiance and compare fluence values against established ICNIRP ocular UVR exposure thresholds. Preliminary field measurements indicate ocular UV exposure often exceeds safety limits, demonstrating the urgency of this problem and the feasibility of our approach. Our work lays the foundation for affordable, wearable UVR monitoring tools that could support preventative eye care and future smart eye-wear designs. This paper issues a timely call to the body sensor network (BSN) and physiological sensing communities to integrate UV sensors into smart glasses.

While researchers in both industry and academia are racing to build Quantum Computing (QC) platforms with viable performance and functionality, the environmental impacts of this endeavor, such as its carbon footprint, e-waste generation, mineral use, and water and energy consumption, remain largely unknown. A similar oversight occurred during the semiconductor revolution and continues to have disastrous consequences for the health of our planet. As we build the quantum computing stack from the ground up, it is crucial to comprehensively assess it through an environmental sustainability lens for its entire life-cycle: production, use, and disposal. In this paper, we highlight the need and challenges in establishing a QC sustainability benchmark that enables researchers to make informed architectural design decisions and celebrate the potential quantum environmental advantage. We propose a carbon-aware quantum computing (CQC) framework that provides the foundational methodology and open research questions for calculating the total life-cycle carbon footprint of a QC platform. Our call to action to the research community is the establishment of a new research direction known as, sustainable quantum computing that promotes both quantum computing for sustainability-oriented applications and the sustainability of quantum computing.

Human-caused climate degradation and the explosion of electronic waste have pushed the computing community to explore fundamental alternatives to the current battery-powered, over-provisioned ubiquitous computing devices that need constant replacement and recharging. Soil Microbial Fuel Cells (SMFCs) offer promise as a renewable energy source that is biocompatible and viable in difficult environments where traditional batteries and solar panels fall short. However, SMFC development is in its infancy, and challenges like robustness to environmental factors and low power output stymie efforts to implement real-world applications in terrestrial environments. This work details a 2-year iterative process that uncovers barriers to practical SMFC design for powering electronics, which we address through a mechanistic understanding of SMFC theory from the literature. We present nine months of deployment data gathered from four SMFC experiments exploring cell geometries, resulting in an improved SMFC that generates power across a wider soil moisture range. From these experiments, we extracted key lessons and a testing framework, assessed SMFC's field performance, contextualized improvements with emerging and existing computing systems, and demonstrated the improved SMFC powering a wireless sensor for soil moisture and touch sensing. We contribute our data, methodology, and designs to establish the foundation for a sustainable, soil-powered future.