2nd Workshop on Sustainable AI


Description of workshop: the main objectives

While AI has made remarkable achievements across various domains, there remain legitimate concerns regarding its sustainability. The pursuit of enhanced accuracy in tackling large-scale problems has led to the adoption of increasingly deep neural networks, resulting in elevated energy consumption and the emission of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change. As an illustration, researchers estimated that the training of a state-of-the-art deep learning NLP model alone generated approximately 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. The environmental sustainability of AI is not the only concern; its societal impact is equally significant. Ethical considerations surrounding AI, including fairness, privacy, explainability, and safety, have gained increasing attention. For instance, biases and privacy issues associated with AI can limit its widespread application in various domains. Without a comprehensive understanding of AI's decision-making processes, it may not be suitable for sensitive areas like healthcare and autonomous driving. Furthermore, AI has the potential to make a profound societal impact by directly addressing contemporary sustainability challenges. Climate modeling, urban planning, and design (for mitigating urban heat islands or optimizing renewable energy deployment, such as solar power), as well as the development of green technologies (such as advanced battery materials or optimized wind/ocean turbine design), are areas where AI techniques can be extensively applied. Leveraging AI in these areas is crucial for ensuring a net benefit to sustainability.

 

Topics

Resource-efficient AI

Efficient and low-carbon AI

Data-efficient AI

Model compression

Power-aware efficient AI accelerators

Nature-inspired optimization for sustainable AI

Explainable & trustworthy AI, and fairness, privacy and safety of AI, with the sustainable societal impact

AI algorithms for resources sustaining and management, smart grids scheduling, climate modeling, smart transportation, recycling and maximizing the efficiency of heating and cooling, manufacturing to reduce waste, and energy and sustainable material development.

Why the topic is of particular interest

AAAI plays a critical role in addressing grand societal challenges across different domains, and it should pay attention to important interdisciplinary areas that can achieve societal impact especially for climate change, sustainability etc. Specifically, for sustainability of AI, we aim to reduce carbon emissions and huge computing power consumption, as well as addressing AI-related ethical issues, via developing advanced AI technology. This workshop aims to prompt state-of-the-art approaches on sustainable AI research and propagates data/resource-efficient methods and possible applications in the sustainability domain that can advance United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For example, submissions that are at the intersection of AI and society like use of AI for ensuring affordable and clean energy (SDG Goal 7), sustainable cities and communities (SDG Goal 11) and motivating climate action (SDG Goal 13) will be particularly welcome. Sustainable AI is a freshly emerging field that is hardly covered by any existing workshop. The proposed workshop will offer a timely collection of information to benefit the researchers and practitioners working in the broad research fields of AI, optimization community. All the aforementioned issues are well covered by the topic of Interest in AAAI 2024.

 

Workshop Chairs

  Xiaoli Li (Nanyang Technological University/A*STAR, Singapore) xlli@i2r.a-star.edu.sg; xlli@ntu.edu.sg

  Joey Tianyi Zhou (A*STAR CFAR, Singapore) zhouty@cfar.a-star.edu.sg

  Callie Hao (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) callie.hao@ece.gatech.edu

  Vijay Janapa Redi (Harvard University, USA) vj@eecs.harvard.edu.

  Yung-Hsiang Lu (Purdue University, USA) yunglu@purdue.edu.

Programme Chair

  Zhenghua Chen (A*STAR, Singapore) Chen_Zhenghua@i2r.a-star.edu.sg.

Programme Committee members

  Abhinav Goel

  Moyun Liu

  Mohamed Ragab

  Feifei Shao

  Zhuoyi Lin

  Ruibing Jin

  Xue Geng

  WANGLU

  Emadeldeen Eldele

  Jun Cheng

  Hao Liu

  Yifang Yin

  Xulei Yang

  QING XU

  Xu Kaixin

  Hao Chen

  Wang Zhe Mark

  Caleb Tung

Accepted Oral Papers

  Veronica Chatrath, Shaina Raza, "She had Cobalt Blue Eyes: Prompt Testing to Create Aligned and Sustainable Language Models"

  Nianhui Guo, Joseph Bethge, Haojin Yang, Kai Zhong, Xuefei Ning, Christoph Meinel, Yu Wang, "BoolNet: Towards Energy-Efficient Binary Neural Networks Design and Optimization"

  Daniel Gei ler, Bo Zhou, Mengxi Liu, Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz, "The Power of Training: How Different Neural Network Setups Influence the Energy Demand"

  Shiyang Li, Jianshu Chen, Yelong shen, Zhiyu Chen, Xinlu Zhang, Zekun Li, Hong Wang, Jing Qian, Baolin Peng, Yi Mao, Wenhu Chen, Xifeng Yan, "Explanations from Large Language Models Make Small Reasoners Better"

  Mengxi Liu, Zimin Zhao, Daniel Gei ler, Bo Zhou, Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz, "CoSS: Co-optimizing Sensor and Sampling Rate for Data-Efficient AI in Human Activity Recognition"

  Hasib-Al Rashid, Tinoosh Mohsenin, "TinyM$^2$Net-V3: Memory-Aware Compressed Multimodal Deep Neural Networks for Sustainable Edge Deployment"

Accepted Poster Papers

  Seoungyoon Kang, Yunji Jung, Hyunjung Shim, "Local Expert Diffusion Models for Efficient Training in Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models"

  Yuhan Wang, Zijian Lei, Liang Lan, "Effective and Sparse Count-Sketch via k-means clustering"

  Chi Zhang, Ang Li, Scott Allen Mueller, Rumen Iliev, "Causal AI Framework for Unit Selection in Optimizing Electric Vehicle Procurement"

  Keying Zhang, "MADA: Mask Aware Domain Adaptation for Open-set Semantic Segmentation"

  Hongyong Han, Wei Wang, Gaowei Zhang, Mingjie Li, Yi Wang, "CR-Cross: A Novel Approach for Cross Domain Coral Recognitions with Reject Options"

 

Workshop Format and Schedule

The Sustainable AI workshop is designed as a comprehensive full-day event that aims to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration among participants. Our program is carefully curated to provide a platform where experts from both academia and industry can contribute their insights. We plan to invite two distinguished keynote speakers who are renowned authorities in the field.

To encourage meaningful discussions, we will organize a panel discussion where participants can engage in an exchange of ideas on critical topics related to sustainable AI. Additionally, we will consider all submissions for both oral and poster presentations. The format of presentation will be determined based on the level of interest and the quality of the submissions.

Recognizing outstanding contributions, we are actively seeking sponsorships to establish prestigious awards for the best paper and best poster. Selected recipients of these awards will have the opportunity to submit their work to a special issue on Sustainable AI in collaboration with our partnering journal, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI), as well as the World Scientific Annual Review of AI. This provides a remarkable opportunity for their research to gain further recognition and reach a wider audience.

 

 

 

Deadlines and Sumission Site

 

Workshop Submissions Due: Friday, November 24, 2023

Notifications Sent to Authors (by organizers): Monday, December 15, 2023

AAAI Sustainable AI Submission Site : AAAI Sustainable AI Submission Site


Workshop Programme

 

AAAI Sustainable AI Workshop Programme : AAAI Sustainable AI Workshop Programme