Participations: Call for Papers

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Workshop 2024

The AAAI-24 Workshop Program will be held in conjunction with the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence from 26 – 27 Feb 2024, encompassing 35 workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. Led by Dr Li Xiaoli, Principal Investigator from A*STAR’s Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), we invite interested individuals for paper submissions to W31: Sustainable AI, focusing on Environmental Sustainability and Societal Sustainability. 

W31: Sustainable AI

While artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable achievements across various domains, there remains 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. Furthermore, AI has the potential to make a profound societal impact by directly addressing contemporary sustainability challenges. Climate modelling, urban planning, and design (for mitigating urban heat islands or optimising renewable energy deployment), as well as the development of green technologies (such as advanced battery materials or optimised 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

Submissions should explicitly focus on the sustainability perspective, encompassing

1. Environmental Sustainability
   
   • AI algorithms for different vertical sustainable domains e.g., smart grids scheduling, climate modelling, energy and sustainable material development, etc.
   • Resource-efficient AI
   • Efficient and low-carbon AI
   • Data-efficient AI
   • Model compression
   • Power-aware efficient AI accelerators
   • Nature-inspired optimisation for sustainable AI
     
     
2. Societal Sustainability
   
   • Explainable & trustworthy AI, and fairness
   • Privacy and safety of AI, with the sustainable societal impact
     

Format of Workshop

The workshop is a full-day event. We plan to invite two distinguished keynote speakers and organise 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.
Selected papers 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), and the World Scientific Annual Review of AI. We are also in the process of creating an edited book on sustainable AI based on selected papers and invited papers, set to be published by World Scientific.

Submission Requirements

Papers must adhere to AAAI style Author kit in PDF format while maintaining anonymity. Submissions consist of up to 6 pages of technical content plus additional reference pages.

Workshop Chairs

Li Xiaoli (Nanyang Technological University/A*STAR, Singapore) | xlli@ntu.edu.sg; xlli@i2r.a-star.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
Lu Yung-Hsiang (Purdue University, USA) | yunglu@purdue.edu

Deadlines

• Workshop submissions: Friday, November 24, 2023
• Notifications sent to authors (by organisers): Monday, December 11, 2023