Sustainable AI Conference 2025:
"Shaping Sustainable AI and its Futures"
About the conference
How can we live in a world marred by constant changes and crises of all scales and magnitudes? Against the backdrop of social transformations and upheavals as well as climate crises and ecological catastrophes, we must investigate how technologies support the good life for all humans and other living entities. Is this a realizable goal or does it remain a utopian dream?
While the answer to this question remains open, the concept of “Sustainable AI” picks up on the underlying desire. It fosters AI applications for sustainability while recognizing the negative sustainability impacts of these very applications. In framing "Sustainable AI" we include environmental, societal, and economic aspects.
The concept of “Sustainable AI”, however, remains a fuzzy one, covering a multitude of different meanings. Questions arise concerning the objective, the scope, the scale, and the very definition of the notion. For example: What is and what needs to be sustained when developing and implementing AI systems? Do “sustainability” and “AI” have the same meaning across the majority and the minority world? And, since different current changes and crises are global in nature but play out locally, how does "Sustainable AI" fit within the tension between the global and local? With an eye towards the future, there is a dire need for approaches across disciplines to find answers to these and other pressing questions.
In addition to this conceptual unclarity, also methodological questions need to be addressed: How should we approach “Sustainable AI”? What disciplines, traditions, methodologies, or schools of thought offer helpful insights? Do we rely on mainstream scholarly traditions, or do we reinvigorate traditions that have been pushed to the perimeter? And where exactly should we turn our regard? To the past or the future? To the most affected or the most responsible? To problems or solutions?
The Bonn Sustainable AI Lab invites scholars, civil society parties, industry and economic stakeholders, and policy-makers to critically reflect on these and other pressing issues during our three-day biennial conference. We invite both conceptual and methodological answers to these questions as well as exemplary case studies or empirical work.
The motivation for this conference is threefold:
- To expand the discussion of Sustainable AI across borders;
- To explore current research in the field of Sustainable AI; and more importantly,
- To harness the insights for transforming the global landscape of AI for sustainable futures.
We invite abstracts on a variety of topics. Some of these themes may include the following:
- Sustainable AI and technosolutionism
- Sustainable AI within local-global tensions
- The politics of AI and sustainability
- The ethics of Sustainable AI
- Sustainable AI, decolonizing AI, and Indigenous perspectives
- Sustainable AI, digital labor and the future of work
- The history and future of Sustainable AI
- Sustainable AI, policy and regulation
- Sustainable AI and industry
- The economics of Sustainable AI
- Sustainable AI and the more-than-human
- Methods in, of, for Sustainable AI
- AI for sustainability vs. the sustainability of AI
- Sustainable AI and feminism
- The futures of AI
- Sustainable vs. Unsustainable AI
- Quantum AI and the question of sustainability
- Sustainable AI, climate change and ecological crises
- ... and any other topics at the intersection of these and other issues
Please keep your abstracts to 350 words maximum and send them to: info@sustainable-ai.eu.
The deadline for submitting the abstracts is 10 March 2025.
Registration
The registration process will start in spring 2025.
If you would like to be notified when registration opens, sign up here. You will be notified one week before the official registration opens. Online participation is also possible.
Video recording
Like our last conferences this conference will also be recorded and available afterwards on our YouTube channel. There will also be a livestream. Please be aware that pictures, video and audio recordings may be made during the conference. You will receive a separate declaration of consent after your registration.
Venue
Universitätsclub Bonn
Konviktstraße 9
53113 Bonn
Germany
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Please use this website link: https://www.iwe.uni-bonn.de/conference