Alp Kucukelbir: Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to make very significant contributions to climate change mitigation. The complexity and scale of the challenge is broad. In this talk, I break down opportunities for AI to effect incremental and transformational change across multiple sectors, focusing on industries with large carbon footprints.

I highlight barriers and risks to the adoption of AI, including the carbon footprint of AI usage worldwide. I focus on the multiple definitions (and ultimate importance) of “trust in AI” and its impact on the integration of AI into complex workflows.

This talk is for AI practitioners looking to understand how AI fits into the bigger picture of climate change. I highlight opportunities and challenges in each sector that I hope will motivate collaboration across academia and industry.

Alp is chief scientist at Fero Labs (factory optimization software for industrial decarbonization) and adjunct professor of computer science at Columbia University (teaching “Machine Learning & Climate”). He recently co-authored a report “Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Roadmap (Second Edition)”, which was launched at COP29. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, where his research won a best thesis award. He is part of the core team on entrepreneurship at Climate Change AI.