GreenGuardian Secures First Place in the GreenDIGIT Discovery Challenge
Nikolaos Vatopoulos and Dimitrios Thanasoulias, third-year students at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Thessaly, have won first place in the international GreenDIGIT Discovery Challenge with an innovative Machine Learning-based system designed to significantly reduce the energy consumption and carbon footprint of computing infrastructures.
The two students presented their project, entitled “GreenGuardian,” on 9 September 2026 in Naples, Italy, during ECML-PKDD 2026, one of Europe’s leading scientific conferences in Machine Learning and Data Mining.
Machine Learning for Greener Computing Infrastructure
The GreenDIGIT Discovery Challenge addressed an increasingly critical issue: the high energy consumption of data centres and research computing infrastructures.
The carbon intensity of electricity supplied by the power grid varies throughout the day, depending on the energy mix. Building on this observation, Nikolaos Vatopoulos and Dimitrios Thanasoulias developed a system that forecasts energy consumption and associated CO₂ emissions over the coming hours and schedules computational workloads during periods when electricity has a lower carbon footprint, while ensuring that all execution deadlines are met.
In a simulation based on real-world data from three computing facilities and 28,662 computational jobs, GreenGuardian achieved an 89.9% reduction in carbon emissions compared with conventional scheduling methods. In a separate test using a real-world forecasting system, the reduction reached 62.2%.
This approach is particularly relevant at a time when demand for computing power is growing rapidly, driven in part by the expansion of Artificial Intelligence applications. As a result, the sustainable operation of digital infrastructure has become a critical area of international research.
A Student-Led Initiative Earns International Recognition
The two students entered the competition entirely on their own initiative, independently of any university course or research laboratory.
The competition was organised as part of GreenDIGIT, a European project funded by the Horizon Europe programme. Both the source code and the students’ research paper have been made publicly available online, enabling the wider research community to verify their findings and build upon their work.
The international achievement of Nikolaos Vatopoulos and Dimitrios Thanasoulias highlights the ability of University of Thessaly students to develop innovative solutions to pressing global challenges and successfully present their work in highly competitive international scientific environments.
Source Code and Research Paper:
https://github.com/GreenGuardianProject/greenguardian
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