SHADE Newsletter 14th December 2023

Welcome to the latest edition of the SHADE newsletter! 

SHADE is a research hub with a mission to explore issues at the intersection of digital technologies/AI, health and the environment. It is guided by a fundamental question: How should the balance between AI/digital enabled health and planetary health be struck in different areas of the world, and what should be the guiding principles?

The SHADE newsletter comes out every two weeks, bringing you a selection of the latest news, podcasts, publications, upcoming events and opportunities in the SHADE space.

In this packed third edition we roundup the latest news on carbon calculators, take a look at AI and health tech regulation, look back and into the future on AI in healthcare, consider calls to action both by and for climate scientists and much more.

We hope you enjoy it and it tides you over the holiday period to our next newsletter on January 11th!

Please tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you think is missing at [email protected].   

News

• Now we can quantify the carbon footprint of AI deployment by task and by AI model (general purpose vs task specific), can we raise awareness in consumers, and increase transparency from machine learning researchers and practitioners on the nature and impacts of their models?

• Carbon footprint calculators for the cloud are in the news: Free and open source tools like Cloud Carbon Footprint are improving transparency, but something like the Green Software Foundation’s project to develop a Real time energy and carbon standard for cloud providers could provide more accurate carbon metrics consistent across all of a customer’s cloud providers.

• Forewarned is forearmed: Check out the predicted carbon intensity of electricity in your region and use it to minimise CO2 emissions.

• The EU agrees on landmark AI regulation, amidst concerns about how this will be enforced and the degree to which it will hamper innovation. Some see it as opening the door to accounting for AI’s harm to the environment.

• Is local and more sustainable frugal innovation finally getting traction beyond the social sciences literature?

• Looking back over 2023, Nature examines how chatbots driven by large language models (LLMs) are changing healthcare, noting how the drivers for these include better recognition of the social determinants of health. Looking forward, Nature also reports on how AI for lung cancer diagnosis and patient triaging in emergency departments make up two of 11 upcoming clinical trials that will shape medicine in 2024. Both of these articles recognise the importance of robust evaluation of AI models prior to implementation, but neither mentions the environmental sustainability of AI, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs).

• Under its new, more climate focussed president, the World Bank announces a new Climate and Health programme, and acknowledges that “the health sector is not only affected by climate change . It also contributes to the magnitude of the crisis”.

• Climate scientists urged the public to become climate activists at the first Health Day at COP28. This came amidst calls for more support for climate scientists to engage with the public.

What we’re listening to

• Chicago Camps Q&A session with Tim Frick, “elder statesman” of Digital Sustainability.

• Forecasting for Hunger from the One Health Trust podcast: Moving from standalone forecasting to impact forecasting to better adapt to climate change.

What we’re reading

• On the medical regulatory front, issues with Medical Device Regulation for the health tech sector in the EU have been highlighted and there are specific concerns around LLM chatbots, which, under EU and US law, require regulation as medical devices.

• Nature examines fears that AI is causing a deluge of unreliable or useless research.

• The urgent need for planetary health education for healthcare professionals and students in India is highlighted by Dr. Anandita Patnaik and SHADE founding member Dr. Manjulika Vaz. It builds on a pilot in India of the Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC), a student led, global initiative. In the UK the PHRC is working with the General Medical Council (GMC) for better recognition of planetary health in undergraduate medical education.

• Heat, health and human genetics from the PHG Foundation lays out the current state of the science on how climate change could impact human health.

• Picking up on the calls for more climate activism, a blog from the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change showcases a model of “long crisis scenarios”. It examines how the seeds of each scenario are already evident, and how our best bet to counter the climate and nature crisis may be to move from being consumers to being active citizens.

Events

• The NeurIPS 2023 workshop ‘Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning’ takes place this Saturday, December 16th in New Orleans. Check out the Fireside Chat at 6.20pm UK time.

• Get involved at the January 11th kick off of AIBIO-UK, a community building project which aspires to be the “go to” place for resource at the interface between AI and the biosciences.

Opportunities

• Sustainability Reporting Manager vacancy in Cambridge University’s Environmental Sustainability Team.

• Do you want to counter corporate greenwashing with better science? Applications for the Scientific Advisory Group at the Science Based Targets initiative are now open. SBTi are also recruiting more generally.

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