✨ Sustainable AI: Myth vs Reality ✨

📣 Welcome to the 4rd edition of the Sustainable IT Netherlands Meetup, where passion for technology converges with a shared commitment to sustainability.

🌿Join us on October 15th for an evening of inspiration, insights, and actionable strategies as we explore the intersection of IT and environmental responsibility! The theme for this evening will be Sustainable IT and Artificial Intelligence, with two great speakers that will talk about the environmental benefits & threats of AI.

⏳ Time schedule:
18:00 - 19:00 Welcome, dinner & networking
19:00 - 20:15 Presentations
20:15 - 21:00 Drinks & networking
21:00 - 21:10 Pitches

📍 Location:
Hosted at Accenture Netherlands, Gustav Mahlerplein 90, Amsterdam
Thank you Accenture for facilitating this edition of the meetup!

✏️ The Challenge of Designing Green ML-Enabled Systems: A Software Architecture Perspective
Speaker: Justus Bogner - Assistant Professor in Software Engineering @ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Summary
While artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly maturing, it remains very challenging for industry to develop production-ready AI-based systems and to operate and maintain them for longer periods of time.

Even though ML models may only be a small piece of these systems, they nonetheless have a profound impact on their functionality and quality attributes, which can be difficult to manage. One important quality attribute that has not received the priority it deserves is environmental sustainability:

• Brief introduction how software engineering for AI-based systems (SE4AI) has emerged to try to tackle these problems
• Looking into software architecture perspective with focus on Green AI by describing our past and ongoing efforts to synthesize and evaluate architectural tactics to improve the environmental sustainability of ML-enabled systems.

📖 About the speaker
Dr. Justus Bogner - Assistant Professor in Software Engineering within the Software and Sustainability (S2) group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

During and after his studies as well as throughout his PhD, he worked as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard and later at DXC Technology for more than nine years. After his PhD in 2020, he was a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Stuttgart in Prof. Wagner's Empirical Software Engineering Group for 3 years, where he led the division "Software Engineering for AI- and Microservice-Based Systems" (SE4AI&MS).
His main research interests are empirical software engineering, software architecture, and software quality (maintainability, evolvability, sustainability), typically applied to AI-based systems (SE4AI) and service- and microservice-based systems.

💡 Sustainable AI and Green Code
📖 Speaker: Nate Kover

Summary
Last summer, the news broke that Microsoft and Google increased their carbon emissions by respectively 30% and 50% compared to a few years prior as a result of their AI ambitions.
This talk will explore following topics:

• The environmental impact of training and running GenAI, especially focusing on the use case of software development with GenAI
• Practical tips for sustainable IT professionals on how to reduce their environmental impact with relation to AI, steps they can take to measure the carbon emissions of their computing and write greener code.

📖 About the speaker
Nate Kover - Sustainability & Technology consultant at Accenture

Nate has a masters in Environmental Science and Technology, and has work experience in carbon footprinting and life cycle analysis for products and services. Nate is committed to sustainability and has also contributed to climate activist organizations in the Netherlands.

Pitches
Our goal is connect people around Sustainable IT. So to build more connections we would like to offer the stage to everyone who wants to share something. Note that we will timebox this on 2 minutes exactly! If you want to share something, please notify us during the welcome moment!

🔎 Looking forward seeing you there!

Organizing team:
Corina Milosoiu, Chris Stapper, Dominick Viëtor and Kitty van Leeuwen