AI biweekly: COP26 - AI Needs to be Part of the Solution!

Dear Artificial Intelligence Enthusiasts,

Companies have committed to reducing their CO2 emissions, but, as we found out in our latest survey, 91% of them are not able to measure what they emit. The good news: AI can help! So, please, all of us AI enthusiasts, let us make sure that this year’s COP26 (where BCG is the exclusive consultancy partner) is an AI COP!

In this edition of my AI biweekly newsletter, let me double down on the possibilities and solutions for how to go green with the help of AI:

• AI can measure and predict: AI can help measure, track, estimate, and identify outliers and anomalies on greenhouse gas emissions. This is essential on how we can remove and reduce these emissions to mitigate global warming (watch this video interview on Carbon Sequestration). Below you will find more examples, e.g. what University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have been working on. Another project we realized with Mila is Code Carbon - an open source software package to track and reduce CO2 emissions from your computing.
• ?AI can optimize: With AI, we are able to cut CO2 emissions by 5-8%. But we need to help companies with implementing: In our latest report, 85% of the surveyed companies are concerned about reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, but only 11% have cut their emissions in line with their ambitions over the past five years.
• AI can visualize: With BCG GAMMA, we are supporting Mila’s project to visualize the impact of climate change called https://thisclimatedoesnotexist.com/. Making the dangers more real for people is one of the keys to more engagement from society.

AI will be one of the main solutions for going Green. So enjoy the following selection of links that tackle this topic. And please, let me know of your experiences on how AI can help the planet.

Until next time,

Sylvain Duranton

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------?

Six Links on Green AI

This website helps you imagine what extreme climate change will do to your home

On ThisClimateDoesNotExist.com you can look up any address — your house, landmarks like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Times Square in New York or San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" homes — and get a surprisingly realistic sense of what it could look like if that place was struck by flood, wildfires or smog. The website, which does this by using AI trained on images of such scenes to re-imagine pictures from Google Street View, was created by researchers at Mila, an AI research - CNN

University of Minnesota researchers tap AI to improve climate models

Now University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers are part of a new $25 million climate modeling center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Their mission: use big data and artificial intelligence to create more precise climate models that help us prepare for the inevitable disruptions ahead - MRP News·????????????????????

11 Examples Of AI Climate Change Solutions For Zero Carbon

According to Charlotte Degot, Managing Director and Partner at BCG GAMMA, “We cannot reduce what we cannot measure. Corporations‘ climate action does not match our ambitions: one of the main reasons is that corporations don’t accurately measure their climate impact and track it enough over time. Fortunately, tools & techniques to help us exist, one of the most powerful ones is artificial intelligence.”? No AI solutions that matter more to humanity than decarbonizing the atmosphere and winning the war on climate change - Forbes

What would it take to make AI ‘greener’?

AI can be a powerful tool to combat climate change, but its role also as a contributor to emissions cannot be overlooked. The first step to make AI greener is to promote the practice of more holistic and multidimensional model evaluation. By changing our mindset that bigger is always better and by pursuing AI use cases in the environmental space, AI can be a major asset in the fight against climate change - World Economic Forum

IBM says AI can help track carbon pollution across vast supply chains

Finding sources of pollution across supply chains is one of the largest barriers to eliminating carbon pollution—so IBM is enlisting the help of artificial intelligence - Ars Technica????

DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain

Predicting the weather is hard--DeepMind developed DGMR, a deep learning tool that is able to predict the location, extent, movement, and intensity of rain 90% of the time. In a blind comparison with 56 forecasters, 89% preferred DGMR's results over both a state-of-the-art physics simulation and a rival deep-learning tool - MIT Tech Review

?