As a student, I loved participating in case competitions and hackathons. In one of these competitions, the LSM Cup, our team won the Belfius case. As part of our price, we had the opportunity to work in the Sustainable technology division of Belfius Bank, which I took with open arms.
Sustainable technology is being conscious of the impact of technology on the climate and the planet. For example, using a energy inefficient computer would heavily impact the amount of pollution caused by you.
In this internship, I mostly worked on the Software Cost of Carbon(SCI). This is a relative score that measures the amount of carbon emissions a certain software program will emit in the atmosphere, per unit of usage. There are three main components, the usage, the embodied emissions and energy. The usage indicates how much the software is being used, it wouldn’t be fair to say that Google search scores worse than a simple program that I created. Secondly, the embodied emissions tell us how much of the emission is released during the production of the machine relative to the usage of the software on that computer. If a computer releases X kilos of carbon equivalent, each of the programs running on the computer gets an amount of X, relative assigned to them. Finally, there is the energy component. This depends on the amount of energy used to run the software and the source of this energy. Energy produced in Iceland is much cleaner than energy in Belgium. At Belfius, I devised a way to calculate the SCI for their different IT systems. The ultimate goal was to integrate this in a dashboard, used by different stakeholders.
One of the reasons I wanted to work in Belfius, was to learn more about financial institutions. Being one of the largest consumer banks in Belgium, Belfius is one of the best places to learn this. I got to talk with different people working within Belfius, from developers to people involved in the operation of the bank.