Join us on July 17 for the Climate + AI Working Group Kick-off Call

Guest post by Cathy Richards and Lakshmee Sharma.

The Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) is kicking off our AI and Climate Working Group on July 17 at 10 am ET! Join us for this meeting if you’d like to hear about and help shape our plans for the rest of the year, as well as discuss all the ways how climate and AI intersect.

Why a Climate and AI Working Group?

The rapid advancement of AI has opened up many opportunities and questions for many. In many ways, AI has the potential to help us address the climate crisis by optimizing energy grids, tracking deforestation, and improving climate models. However, this potential does not come without its own cost. AI’s carbon footprint, and energy and water consumption come at a tremendous cost to the environment itself. Which begs the question: How do we make use of this tool while mitigating its climate effects?

The good news is that many bright minds have already been thinking about this. From calls for more transparency on data centers’ water use to adopting smaller, more localized language models, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers have been trying to find ways to address these challenges and innovate ways to sustainably use AI tools for good. And we’re curious to explore what are the most promising applications of AI for climate action are right now.

Join our first Climate and AI Working Group meeting

At this first Working Group meeting, co-led by Cathy Richards, Civic Science Fellow & Data Inclusion Specialist, and Lakshmee Sharma, a tech policy and economic development expert, we will collaboratively develop a shared agenda for the group. We plan for these findings to inform our future calls, so we can be hopeful but critical of the tools we use.

Some of the questions we hope to explore together include:

• How can we accurately measure and mitigate the environmental footprint of these technologies?
• What can we expect (and push for) from policymakers in the coming years? (And how might recent policies affect our current efforts?)
• What innovations are coming out of this space to make AI more sustainable and climate-friendly?

We’d love for you to join us! Sign up below.