Friday Night AI | AI & Energy: Balancing Power and Sustainability

When

Friday March 13, 2026: 6:30pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: 1st Floor Lobby

Description

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 the benefits of AI 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.

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. 

Alexandra 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. 

This event is in partnership with the Michigan AI Lab.