Science videos for everyone

We’ve all seen our fare share of fake news, conspiracy theories, and cat-related content on the internet. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it’s become even more important to have low-threshold initiatives that try to strengthen trust in the scientific community to set apart fact from fiction.

It is this exact goal that FÄKT strives for: FÄKT is a short video format targeted to kids and young adults that is streaming on social media (TikTok, YouTube, EduTube, and Instagram). It brings researchers and their scientific work to the forefront with videos that aim to convey who is behind the research, and how scientific processes work.

In the FÄKT video series, Ivona Brandic, professor at TU Wien Informatics, presents her research on “power-hungry” AI such as ChatGPT and other software. When we think about AI, what we usually don’t think about is how much energy is needed to power it. In the FÄKT video, Ivona Brandic highlights how much energy things like generative AI really need, and to give you an idea about how much that is, generating 1 video with AI takes about as much energy as playing video games on your PlayStation for 36 hours or watching roughly 100 hours of TV.

With FÄKT, which is coordinated by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW) and funded by the Fonds Zukunft Österreich (FZÖ), researchers have gained a new platform to reach out to a young audience, to present and talk about their research, and to show how their research can impact our society.

Watch the full video with Ivona Brandic:

Want to know more about the connection between Technology, Innovation and energy consumption? Check out our research projects, lectures and talks about Sustainability: https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/sustainability/

About Ivona Brandic

Ivona Brandic is a Full Professor at the Institute of Information Systems Engineering at TU Wien Informatics. In 2015 she was awarded the FWF START prize, the highest Austrian award for early career researchers. Since 2016 she has been a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. From 2002 to 2007 she was Assistant Professor at the Department of Scientific Computing, University of Vienna.

From 2007 to 2014 she was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Information Systems at TU Wien. From 2014 to 2015 she was Assistant Professor at the Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems. She received her PhD degree in 2007 and her venia docendi for practical computer science in 2013, both from Vienna University of Technology. From 2009 to 2012 she led the Austrian national FoSII (Foundations of Self-governing ICT Infrastructures) project funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF). In 2011 she received the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the Vienna University of Technology for her project on the Holistic Energy Efficient Hybrid Clouds. Her interests comprise virtualized HPC systems, energy efficient ultra-scale distributed systems, massive-scale data analytics, hybrid classic/quantum systems, and software engineering methods for sustainability.

In 2019 she chaired the CHIST-ERA panel (ANR) on Smart Distribution of Computing in Dynamic Networks (SDCDN). She is a board member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML) and a faculty member of the Vienna Center for Engineering in Medicine (ViCEM).

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