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Electronics < > Ecologies #5 — ENERGY Part 2
23 January 2024 @ 9:00 am - 12:00 pm AEDT
Part two of our Electronics < > Ecologies discussion on ENERGY brings engineers' voices to the foreground, drawing on real examples of AI implementation and sustainability goal-setting in the context of Big Tech.
The IT sector currently accounts for somewhere between 1-4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with some scholars suggesting this will rise to at least 14% by 2040. These estimates predate the release of popular AI applications such as ChatGPT, which accelerate the uptake of energy-intensive computing habits. The current trajectory for AI development and deployment reflects generations of engineering training and business incentives that measured success in terms of size, accuracy and latency. But does AI need to be big to be effective? Are there other ways of implementing AI models? What does engineering look like beyond the energy infrastructure of West Coast North America? And how can sustainable computing exist in spite of the visions and business plans of dominant cloud companies?
Join us for 3 talks that explore these questions in theory and in practice.
Image credit – Zane Griffin Talley Cooper.
Tuesday 23rd AU / Monday 22nd US (Online)
SPEAKERS
Cindy Lin
Cindy Lin is an ethnographer and information science assistant professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Her first single-authored book project explores statecraft and computing practices in the environmental and mapping sciences in Indonesia and the professional identities and government institutions that emerged from these efforts.
Sylvia Downing
Sylvia is a Senior Principal Engineer and AI Architect with extensive experience inventing, standardising and bringing new technologies to market. With over 30 years in high tech, her specialities include quantifying and reporting Scope 3 downstream carbon emissions for compute systems; multi-modal AI sensing (presence detection, noise suppression, transcription) and low power graphics, media, HDMI / Display Port / HDCP.
Dr Melissa Gregg
Melissa Gregg is a consultant on sustainable and responsible technology design and an International Advisory Board Member for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). For the past decade, she led User Experience Research in the Client Computing Group at Intel, driving a range of product initiatives including the research that launched Intel EVO laptops. As Senior Principal Engineer in the Software and Advanced Technology Group, she established the first product team focused on carbon reduction and green software to achieve corporate-wide Net Zero commitments.
