LOCOS Seminar – Ana Valdivia: “Quantifying the environmental impacts of AI supply chains”

Low Carbon Computing Seminar

Ana Valdivia, Departmental Research Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Government, and Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), will deliver their talk “Quantifying the environmental impacts of AI supply chains”

In recent decades, several studies have demonstrated that AI has significant environmental impacts. As the size of algorithms has increased, AI now consumes more resources than previous machine learning models. More energy, land, water, and raw materials are required to power this technology, leading to carbon emissions that contribute to global warming, water withdrawal from rivers and local communities, and land acidification, all of which pose serious risks to flora and fauna. However, the challenge lies in developing standardised methodologies to quantify the environmental impacts of AI. Currently, there is a lack of publicly available information on AI’s environmental footprint, but one of the few data sources is the corporate sustainability reports published by companies each year. In this lecture, we will explore the opportunities and limitations of using this data, and how machine learning techniques can be applied to analyse it, shedding light on the relevant aspects of AI’s contribution to environmental issues across its supply chains.

See past and future LOCOS Seminars at https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/computing/research/researchthemes/lowcarbon/