Sustainable AI

In Brief

The goal of Sustainable AI is to reduce energy consumption for a more sustainable AI and also find a way in which AI could contribute to solve some of the big sustainability challenges that face humanity today (e.g., climate change).

More in Detail

AI systems are responsible of most of energy consumption nowadays.

Referring to UN sustainability goals highlighted in Societal and Environmental Wellbeing, it is important to ensure:

• Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy: along with the growth of the world population and the demand for cheap energy, we need to expand our infrastructures and upgrade technologies to provide clean and more efficient energy.

• Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities: even if this goal is mainly related with the development of urban areas, the general principle is that sustainable development cannot be achieved without significantly transforming the way we build and manage our resources.

• Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production: this goal requires that we urgently reduce our ecological footprint by changing the way we produce and consume goods and resources.

Indeed, it is important to use clean energy and wisely manage our resources but also avoid to waste energy for deprecabile AI computations.

For this reason, we explore concepts such as Green AI, Edge Computing, efficient use of data centres, and Resource Allocation.

This entry was written by Francesca Pratesi.