Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an integral part of our everyday lives. As such, it also plays a role in the mounting climate emergency. For example, training a single large natural language processing model can consume as much energy as a car over its entire lifetime. At the same time, AI can help mitigate the effects of the climate crisis by helping to understand complex weather patterns and climate systems to improve climate change projections. This second event of the four-part event series “AI Here and There” will focus on the question: can AI be a tool for sustainability that can help us save our planet? Perspectives from both Switzerland and the US will be brought to the table.

AI Here and There: Transatlantic Dialogues on Artificial Intelligence, Society, and Innovation

In the past decade, AI has quietly and quickly become prominent in our daily lives, whether we have realized it or not. AI has made itself indispensable in our private lives, in the workplace, in sports, and even in art. However, there are only a select few that truly understand AI and what it means for society. This four-part event series aims at introducing the subject of AI to a broad audience. Each event will be focused on different subjects, with panelists from both Switzerland and the US.

This series is organized by the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York and the Center for Responsible AI | NYU Tandon School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Swiss Business Hub USA and Swissnex in Boston and New York.

Switzerland

Digitalization offers new opportunities for diplomacy, poverty reduction, and sustainable development. But there are also risks involved in the processing of vast amounts of data, the spread of fake news, and surveillance. By adopting the Digital Foreign Policy Strategy 2021–2024, Switzerland is acknowledging digitalization as a thematic priority of its foreign policy. The world is constantly changing and needs a hub, in other words, a space that brings together all states, businesses, and citizens – all directly affected by the new challenges of digitalization. International Geneva is a hub for digital governance. The goal is to promote transparent debate, strengthen international law and encourage international cooperation in dealing with abuses and surveillance while paying heed to public opinion, and increase the benefits of new technologies. This virtual series contributes to this inclusive discussion. 

Center for Responsible AI (R/AI)

As a research and tool production lab, R/AI is charting a path towards responsible AI. In practice, this means ensuring that technical advances are combined with a shift in business practices and much-needed regulatory mechanisms that are informed by social research and robust public participation. 

Launched in 2020, R/AI has conducted research on automated decision making systems in hiring; hosted thought-provoking events to debate trends and spotlight tensions; developed new interdisciplinary research projects; a co-generated novel, open-source responsible AI/AI literacies curricula for use with adults in informal learning settings at public libraries; produced a dynamic multi-lingual comic series about responsible data science as well as “nutritional labels” to make AI explainability more transparent; advocated for municipal oversight of automated decision-systems; published papers that move the discourse on responsible AI forward; advised on field-based councils, and supported AI for Good programs such as the Women in AI Accelerator.

Carrol Plummer, Vivent

Carrol Plummer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Vivent, an ag-tech business that aims to deliver autonomous horticulture systems for growers and speed up product development for agrochemical companies so that we can grow healthy food with less environmental impact. She is an experienced entrepreneur focused on deep tech innovations. She has lots of experience in B2B markets with complex distribution channels and is happiest working with colleagues on solving challenging problems. Carrol Plummer is excited to be exploring how understanding information flows in biology can lead to breakthroughs in agriculture, human health, and biofilm management. She has an MBA from INSEAD and is a Mechanical engineer from Banff, Canada but now lives in Western Switzerland. Find out more about Vivent in this portrait of three Swiss start-ups at the forefront of ‘green tech’ — technological innovations that enable more sustainable farming practices.

Fernando Perez-Cruz, ETH Zurich

Fernando Perez-Cruz is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich and Chief Data Scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC). SDSC is a joint venture between EPFL and ETH Zurich. The Center’s mission is to accelerate the use of data science and machine learning techniques within academic disciplines of the ETH Domain, the Swiss academic community at large, and the industrial sector. A multi-disciplinary team of senior data scientists and experts in domains such as personalized health and medicine, earth and environmental science, social science and digital humanities, as well as economics enables collaboration on both academic and industrial projects. Prof. Perez-Cruz received a PhD. in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid. He has been a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs and a Machine Learning Research Scientist at Amazon. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton University under a Marie Curie Fellowship and an associate professor at University Carlos III in Madrid. He has also held positions at the Gatsby Unit (London), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Tuebingen), BioWulf Technologies (New York).

Eric Nost, University of Guelph

Eric Nost is an Assistant Professor in Geography, Environment, and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. Eric Nost is a geographer researching how data and technology inform conservation. He draws on and contributes to the fields of political ecology, science and technology studies, and digital geographies. Nost received a Ph.D. in geography (2018) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Eric Nost researches how data technologies inform environmental governance. New kinds of data-generating sensors and data-synthesizing algorithms are becoming central to everyday life and may prove transformational at a policy level as well. A key challenge for geographers in the coming years is assessing the promises of these technologies to help society solve sustainability issues related to food security, climate change adaptation, and ecosystem services conservation. He also participates in the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, tracking how the U.S. federal government portrays climate change and other issues on the web. For the past several years, Nost has collaborated to collate and visualize U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data on the North American hazardous waste trade.

Venkatramani Balaji, Princeton University

Venkatramani Balaji has headed the Modeling Systems Division at Princeton University’s Cooperative Institute on Modeling the Earth System (CIMES) since 2003 and is Associate Faculty at the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE) and the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI). With a background in physics and climate science, he has also become an expert in the area of parallel computing and scientific infrastructure. He is co-chair of the WGCM Infrastructure Panel (WIP), tasked with developing the scientific requirements for the global data infrastructure underlying the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), a pillar of the IPCC Assessment Reports of the state of the Earth’s climate. In 2017, he was among the first recipients of French President Macron’s Make Our Planet Great Again award marking the second anniversary of the Paris Climate Accord. He has served on scientific advisory panels for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and is currently on the Science Review Group of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. He is a sought-after speaker and lecturer and is committed to providing training in the use of climate models in developing nations, leading workshops for advanced students and researchers in South Africa and India. Dr. V. Balaji has an M.Sc in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the Ohio State University.