Conference Calculator

About Team

The Conference Calculator is a new initiative of the Grantham Institute, prompted by the alarming fact that scientists have a much greater carbon footprint than the global average. This is partly due to multiple long-distance flights they take each year to attend conferences, summer schools, meetings and workshops. There is a growing awareness of the issue in the academic world, but it can be challenging to make informed choices without relevant data and statistics. This project, in the form of a website, aims to fill that gap by providing easily interpretable information about attending a given conference.

Academic events such as international conferences can be of great importance for learning, networking, presenting and collaborating. However, in some cases, online participation can be just as rewarding. In an effort to reduce the carbon footprint of scientists by selecting the conferences they attend in person, one of the inputs to the calculator aims to quantify the importance of a conference based on a few questions. For example, the tool asks if the user is presenting, how often the conference is held, if the conference is offered in a hybrid format, if the conference topic is broad or specific to the user's expertise, etc. Based on the scientific literature and our own metrics, the tool generates a 'score' quantifying the importance of the event. This score may of course be subjective, but it provides insight and prompts the user to think about these questions.

Another aspect to consider is the mode of transportation (train, plane, carpooling, bus, etc.) and their associated carbon footprint. The Conference Calculator, first applied to inter-Europe conferences as a pilot study, generates routes between two cities (e.g., London to Milan) and calculates the carbon footprint for every mode of transportation. A future feature will also take into account the price and travel time. The carbon footprints are then compared to the importance of the conference via various types of graphics (e.g., 2D plots). Some information from the literature is displayed so that the user can properly interpret their results.

On the education and outreach side, we hope that the calculator will become a means to make more informed choices, but also to encourage Imperial College to invest more in alternative modes of transportation (considering that taking the train is generally more expensive, for example). Moreover, within our team, this project serves as an introduction to coding in Python and HTML. Whether they are advanced coders or beginners, our goal is for everyone to learn from this project.

In summary, The Conference Calculator will be a freely available tool for scientists. Ultimately, the choice to attend a conference is theirs; this tool provides quantitative information so that they can make more informed choices. Our vision is that the calculator will always be used when deciding to attend a conference.

Team Members

Abha Joglekar - Cohort 9
Hannah Murdock - Cohort 8
Iona Anderson - Cohort 9
Jeremie Morel - Cohort 9
Lorenzo Mangone - Cohort 9
Myriam Prasow-Emond - Cohort 9
Tsvetoslav Georgiev - Cohort 9
Adam Brighty - Cohort 8