Is AI Good or Bad for the Climate? It’s Complicated.

David Rolnick (McGill University, Canada)

With the increasing deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools across society, it is important to understand in which ways AI may accelerate or impede climate progress, and how various stakeholders can guide those developments. On the one hand, AI can facilitate climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies within a variety of sectors, such as energy, manufacturing, agriculture, forestry, and disaster management. On the other hand, AI can also contribute to rising greenhouse gas emissions through applications that benefit high-emitting sectors or drive increases in consumer demand, as well as via energy use associated with AI itself. In this talk, we will explore AI’s multi-faceted relationship with climate change.

The talk will be moderated by Peter Knees (TU Wien Informatics, Austria).

How to join the talk

You can follow the talk on Zoom (Password: 0dzqxqiy).

The talk will also be live streamed and recorded on YouTube.

Find further announcements and information about the speakers in the Lecture Series here. Please note that you can access the slides and recordings of our past events via that link.

David Rolnick

David Rolnick is an Assistant Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair in the School of Computer Science at McGill University and at Mila Quebec AI Institute. He is a Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI and serves as Scientific Co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age. Dr. Rolnick received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT. He is a former NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar, and was named to the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35.

Peter Knees

Peter Knees is an Associate Professor of the Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien, Austria and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Music for the Fall term 2022. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from TU Wien and a PhD in the same field from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. For almost two decades, he has been an active member of the Music Information Retrieval research community, reaching out to the related fields of multimedia and text information retrieval, recommender systems, and the digital arts. His research activities center on music search engines and interfaces as well as music recommender systems, and more recently, on smart(er) tools for music creation. He is one of the proponents of the Digital Humanism initiative of the Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien.

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