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Date and Time: Thursday 21 November 2024 I 15:00-16:30 CET I 9:00-10:30 AM ET I Zoom
“AI Risks and Opportunities for Biodiversity” is the third episode of the IEEE Technology Center for Climate (ITCC) webinar series on “AI and Sustainability.” This webinar, organized by ITCC in collaboration with the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence’s (GPAI) RAISE project and supported by Centre d’expertise international de Montréal en Intelligence artificielle (CEIMIA), will explore the relationship between AI and biodiversity through use cases illustrating the promises and risks of AI for biodiversity.
According to a UNEP report, we are using the equivalent of 1.6 Earths to maintain our current way of life, a non-sustainable approach, while nearly 13 percent of the world´s estimated 8 million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction. Nature loss and degradation caused by human activities has far reaching consequences as damaged ecosystems can have a negative impact on climate, food security and health.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an enabling technology with promising applications across all sectors, including biodiversity preservation. Using AI to support monitoring and preservation of endangered species, deforestation, marine loss, are some of the methods where AI can have a positive impact.
At the same time AI has its own environmental footprint and may create additional risks to biodiversity while using it to combat biodiversity loss. As a result, conservation organizations and other entities considering the adoption of AI should take into account both risks and benefits, and find ways to mitigate risk for a responsible AI deployment.
Panelists representing industry and policy makers will address how organizations and governments will need to take responsibility to protect natural resources and the environment while they move forward with deploying sustainable AI systems.
Speakers and moderator
Raja Chatila, Professor Emeritus of Robotics, AI and Ethics at ISIR-CNRS / Sorbonne Université, Global Partnership on AI
Antoine Gagné-Turcotte, CTO, Co-Founder & Software Developer at Whale Seeker
Maik Schwalm, Head of Sustainability Cloud Infrastructure, CapGemini
Daniele Silvestro, Computational biologist at University of Fribourg and Co-founder of Captain technologies LTD
Christopher Whitt, Senior Engineering and Safety Consultant Lloyd’s Register Foundation; Past President, IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society
Tanya Berger-Wolf, Director, Translational Data Analytics Institute, Professor, Computer Science Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering: Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, Ohio State University, USA (moderator)About the Webinar Series on AI and Sustainability
The “AI and Sustainability” webinar series is a continuation of our previous collaboration with Reuters Events on “Empowering the Green Tech Revolution.” The series explores how sustainable AI is essential to harness the benefits of technologies like generative AI while safeguarding our environment and finite resources.
ITCC Survey
A survey will be shared with participants, prior to the webinar. The survey results will be weaved into the webinar discussion and the series report.