Artificial intelligence is emerging as a powerful tool used in an increasing number of applications, including efforts to improve how we use and conserve energy, from optimizing heating and cooling systems in buildings to coordinating smart grids, forecasting demand, and identifying new opportunities for efficiency across industries. At the same time, training and deploying large AI models requires vast computational resources and significant amounts of electricity, raising concerns about carbon emissions and other air pollution, water consumption, and the long-term energy footprint of AI itself. How can we harness AI’s benefits while avoiding the escalating costs of running increasingly large systems? What role can smaller models, hardware advances, and new design practices play in making AI more sustainable? Join us for a conversation with experts in AI & systems and energy and environmental law as we explore how to balance innovation with environmental responsibility. With interactive activities by graduate students Snehal Prabhudesai and Yara El-Tawil

Panelists: Mosharaf Chowdhury, Alexandra Klass
Moderator: Rada Mihalcea

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing, with a focus on multimodal processing and computational social sciences. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).

Mosharaf Chowdhury is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he leads the SymbioticLab. His research focuses on making AI/ML workloads more efficient, with a particular emphasis on reducing their energy consumption through the ML Energy Initiative. Major open-source projects from his team include Infiniswap, the first scalable memory disaggregation solution; FedScale, a planetary-scale AI/ML platform; TPP, a tiered memory manager integrated into the Linux kernel (v5.18+); and Zeus, the first energy-optimal generative AI stack. Previously, Mosharaf invented the concept of coflows and was one of the original creators of Apache Spark. He has received numerous individual honors, including fellowships and paper awards from NSDI, OSDI, ATC, and MICRO.

Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan
Law School. She teaches and writes primarily in the areas of energy law, environmental law, and natural resources law. In 2022 and 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Demonstrations at the U.S. Department of Energy. Professor Klass’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory and permitting challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. Before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2022, Professor Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she was a member of the faculty from 2006 to 2022. She has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Harvard Law School, Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Prior to her academic career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation. For more details on Professor Klass’s background and publications, please see https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/alexandra-klass .