Digital Discovery Session: Using Artificial Intelligence for Climate Action

When: 30 March from 15:00 to 17:00 CET

Where: Online on Zoom, enroll here.

We are pleased to announce that the March Digital Discovery session will focus on the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate climate action.

The event, featuring speakers from Climate Change AI and the Centre for AI & Climate, will concentrate on the recent report for the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI). The report provides 48 specific recommendations for how governments can support the application of AI to climate challenges, as well as addressing climate-related risks that AI poses. It also highlights a number of high-impact use cases where AI is already making a difference in climate action across the public and private sectors. The report is a great resource for helping to understand concrete AP applications that UNEP can help take forward as part of our new Digital Transformation subprogramme (attached).

The session will be lead by:

• David Rolnick: an Assistant Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair in the School of Computer Science at McGill University and at Mila Quebec AI Institute. He is a Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI and serves as Scientific Co-director of Sustainability in the Digital Age. Dr. Rolnick received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT. He is a former NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar, and was named to the MIT Technology Review's 2021 list of "35 Innovators Under 35".
• Lynn Kaack: Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy at the Hertie School. Her work focuses on methods from statistics and machine learning to inform climate mitigation policy across the energy sector, and on climate-related AI policy. She is also a co-founder and chair of the organization Climate Change AI. Previously she was Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in the Energy Politics Group at ETH Zürich. She obtained a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy and a Master's in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University.
• Pete Clutton-Brock: co-founder of the Centre for AI & Climate, where he supports the application of data science and AI to climate-related challenges. He is CEO of Radiance International, an independent climate consultancy where he works with some of the largest tech companies in the world on corporate climate strategy and delivery. He has in-depth expertise in climate policy and government relations - having worked for the UK Government on national and international climate policy.
• Priya Donti: a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, an initiative to catalyze impactful work in climate change and machine learning. Her work focuses on machine learning for forecasting, optimization, and control in high-renewables power grids. Specifically, her research explores methods to incorporate the physics and hard constraints associated with electric power systems into deep learning models. Priya is a member of the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35,” and is a recipient of the Siebel Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and best paper awards at ICML (honorable mention), ACM e-Energy (runner-up), PECI, the Duke Energy Data Analytics Symposium, and the NeurIPS workshop on AI for Social Good.

Join us for an engaging dialogue exploring the intersection of AI, climate change, and policy!