University of Toronto Hosts ACM COMPASS 2025

🎤 From July 22 - 25, University of Toronto hosted the 2025 iteration of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS)! 🌱

Some key highlights from the conference:

🌎 This year, COMPASS welcomed 221 attendees from 22 countries, 42 of whom were from 12 countries in the Global South.

👩‍💻 An inspiring and diverse community of contributors from across borders and disciplines came together to make this conference a success: 36 members on the Organizing Committee, 89 dedicated reviewers, 16 incredible volunteers - plus 69 paper presentations across 17 sessions, 6 insightful panels, and so much more!

📍This year’s theme - “computing in place” - was an exploration of interdisciplinary research on sustainability with a focus on how computing and moves toward sustainability are embedded in and shaped by specific local contexts. COMPASS welcomed work that critically examines how technology intersects with social, environmental, and economic systems, encouraging a deeper, situated perspective on how technological practices emerge as solutions, but also as contributors to the complexities they claim to address.

🎙️This year’s conference featured two incredible keynote speakers - Renee Sieber, Associate Professor at McGill University, who spoke about participatory AI governance as a sustainability goal, and Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Research Scientist at the Robotics and AI Institute, who explored why designing with place matters for technology development.

🌟 Watch this space for more highlights from COMPASS 2025!