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Future Positive

What Is AI For Good Anyways?

Season 3, Ep. 9
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In recent years, a large number of AI for Good projects have been deployed all over the world, using AI to solve critical issues such as poverty, hunger and climate change. While certainly well-intentioned, these projects often miss crucial elements in their design and deployment, which can result in a large amount of fanfare but very little impact. 


In today’s episode which was recorded at AI for Good, a global summit hosted by ITU and XPRIZE, we’re joined by Sasha Luccioni, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Mila Labs in Quebec, Canada. Sasha will explores some guiding principles that will help to ensure AI is used for the biggest positive impact.


Sasha Luccioni is a Postdoctoral Researcher working with Yoshua Bengio and others on a project that uses Artificial Intelligence to visualize the consequences of climate change. She also leads various climate change-related initiatives at Mila, including projects that aim to estimate the environmental impact of Machine Learning and to analyze financial disclosures from a climate standpoint.


Her work sits at the intersection of AI and the environment with the goal to find ways to maximize the positive impacts of AI while minimizing the negative ones - be it from a research or application perspective. She is also involved in general ‘AI for Good’ projects and has been working with the United Nations and the World Health Organization to figure out ways in which AI can help tackle the Covid-19 pandemic.


She publishes under her full name, Alexandra Luccioni, and you can find a full list of her publications here. Her work has been featured in various news and media outlets such as MIT Technology Review, WIRED and the Wall Street Journal, among others, for her work on the environmental impact of AI and how to reduce it. She is also a 2020 National Geographic Explorer and holds an IVADO postdoctoral scholarship.


Links:

xprize.org/blog


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