CAIML Board Members Ivona Brandic and Nysret Musliu will hold online lectures on sustainability in computer science, as part of public lectures series on “Sustainability in Computer Science” of TU Wien Informatics.

Sustainability is not an optional feature. Targeting economic, social, and ecological issues through sustainable development has become a must, not least since the publication of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in 2015.

Computer Science (CS), and more prominently and recently, Artificial Intelligence (AI), is hailed as the solution to many sustainability problems (and yes, it is!). Still, energy efficiency and CO2 reduction must be considered to ensure fair and ecological use of resources. Hence, dealing with informatics and sustainability involves two faces of the same coin: Sustainability with CS, often referred to as “Computational Sustainability”, and Sustainability for CS, commonly known as “Sustainable CS”.

About the Events

Nysret Musliu

October 23, 2023
5:00 - 6:00 PM
(17:00) CEST

Ivona Brandic

November 20, 2023
5:00 - 6:00 PM
(17:00) CEST

Zoom Link

Participate online via Zoom, Meeting ID: 638 6728 1732, Passcode: Xnupv5gi.

Nysret Musliu, October 23, 2023

AI and Optimization for Sustainable Applications

Real-life problems in domains as diverse as health care, supply chain, production and education are frequently very challenging and their solutions impact people involved as well as the resource consumption and efficiency of operations. Optimization and AI provide robust techniques that can be employed to effectively address such problems in a variety of sustainable applications. This lecture gives an overview of various AI and optimization techniques, including problem-solving and machine-learning techniques. Through case studies in scheduling and planning, as well as food waste reduction, we will demonstrate how these techniques can be applied to solve complex problems in sustainable applications.

Ivona Brandic, November 20, 2023

Computational Sustainability: From Sustainable IT to IT for a Sustainable World

In the first part of this talk, we will discuss the concepts of sustainable IT. We will present novel approaches for sustainable fault tolerance and trustworthy geographically distributed AI applications utilized on systems ranging from the size of a smartphone to a warehouse-scale data center. Furthermore, we will discuss the novel concept of hybrid classic/quantum systems as a response to the increasing demand for computational resources. Scientific applications are nowadays utilizing different types of hardware accelerators including GPUs, TPUs and NPUs. With the arrival of the post-Moore Era and the rise of quantum computing, we are experiencing new opportunities but also challenges when trying to integrate quantum computers into the well-known computational continuum. This integration into so-called hybrid systems promises resource efficiency at a new order of magnitude. We will discuss challenges regarding the data encoding, noise, transpilation and the high heterogeneity of quantum architectures which necessitate the development and integration of additional hardware/software layers. In the second part of the talk, we will present several use cases, where IT can be utilized to combat climate change and help us to develop a more sustainable world including sustainable watershed management through IoT-driven artificial intelligence and satellite-based monitoring of livestock in the Alpine region.

For further details about the whole public lectures series on sustainability in computer science: https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/2467

Videos of the Lectures

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