̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - data

Is Data Justice key to Climate Justice?

plc32 — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 11:00:00 +0000

Bias in the collection of data on which Artificial Intelligence (AI) computer programmes depend can limit the usefulness of this rapidly growing tool for climate scientists predicting future scenarios and guiding global action, according to a new paper by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge published in Nature’s npj |Climate Action series.

AI computer programmes used for climate science are trained to trawl through complex datasets looking for patterns and insightful information. However, missing information from certain locations on the planet, time periods or societal dynamics create “holes” in the data that can lead to unreliable climate predictions and misleading conclusions.

Primary author and Cambridge Zero Fellow Dr Ramit Debnath said that individuals with access to technology, such as scientists, teachers, professionals and businesses in the Global North are more likely to see their climate priorities and perceptions reflected in the digital information widely available for AI use.

By contrast, those without the same access to technology, such as indigenous communities in the Global South, are more likely to find their experiences, perceptions and priorities missing from those same digital sources.

“When the information on climate change is over-represented by the work of well-educated individuals at high-ranking institutions within the Global North, AI will only see climate change and climate solutions through their eyes,” Debnath said.

“Biased” AI has the potential to misrepresent climate information.

For example, it could generate ineffective weather predictions or underestimate carbon emissions from certain industries, which could then misguide governments trying to create policy and regulations aimed at mitigating or adapting to climate change.

AI-supported climate solutions which spring from biased data are in danger of harming under-represented communities, particularly those in the Global South with scant resources. These are often the same communities who also find themselves most vulnerable to the extreme weather events caused by climate change such as floods, fires, heatwaves and drought.

That is a combination which could lead to “societal tipping events”, the paper warns.

However, these “data holes” can be filled by human knowledge. ̽��ֱ��authors advocate for a human-in-the loop design to offer AI climate change programmes with a sense check on which data is used and the context in which it is used, in an effort to improve the accuracy of predictions and the usefulness of any conclusions.

̽��ֱ��authors mention popular AI chatbot model ChatGPT, which has recently taken the world by storm for its ability to communicate conversationally with human users. On ChatGPT, the AI can ask its human users follow-up questions, admit mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.

This ‘human-in-the-loop’ style AI allows bias to be noticed and corrected, the authors said. Users can input critical social information, such as existing infrastructure and market systems, to allow the AI to better anticipate any unintended socio-political and economic consequences of climate action.

“No data is clean or without prejudice, and this is particularly problematic for AI which relies entirely on digital information,” co-author, Cambridge Zero Director and climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh said.

In highlighting the importance of globally inclusive datasets, the paper also promotes broadband internet access as a public necessity, rather than a private commodity, to engage as many users as possible in the design of AI for contemporary conversations about climate action.

̽��ֱ��paper concludes that human-guided technology remains instrumental in the development of socially responsible AI.

Less-biased AI will be critical to our understanding of how the climate is changing, and consequently in guiding realistic solutions to mitigate and adapt to the on-going climate crisis, the authors said.

Professor Shuckburgh, who also leads the UK national research funding body’s (UKRI) Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER), said that recognising the issue of data justice is the first step to better outcomes.

“Only with an active awareness of this data injustice can we begin to tackle it, and consequently, to build better and more trustworthy AI-led climate solutions,” she said.

Biased artificial intelligence needs human help to avoid harmful climate action, Cambridge researchers say.

No data is clean or without prejudice, and this is particularly problematic for AI which relies entirely on digital information

Professor Emily Shuckburgh

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Vehicles with weather observation equipment track a storm

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Act now to prevent uncontrolled rise in carbon footprint of computational science

cjb250 — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 09:04:03 +0000

Writing in Nature Computational Science, researchers from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge argue that the scientific community needs to act now if it is to prevent a potentially uncontrolled rise in the carbon footprint of computational science as data science and algorithms increase in usage.

Dr Loïc Lannelongue, who is a research associate in biomedical data science and a postdoctoral associate at Jesus College, Cambridge, said: “Science has transformed our understanding of the world around us and has led to great benefits to society. But this has come with a not-insignificant – and not always well understood – impact on the environment. As scientists – as with people working in every sector – it’s important that we do what we can to reduce the carbon footprint of our work to ensure that the benefits of our discoveries are not outweighed by their environmental costs.”

Recent studies have begun to explore the environmental impacts of scientific research, with an initial focus on scientific conferences and experimental laboratories. For example, the 2019 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union was estimated to emit 80,000 tons of CO2e* (tCO2e), equivalent to the average weekly emissions of the city of Edinburgh, UK. ̽��ֱ��annual carbon footprint of a typical life science laboratory has been estimated to be around 20 tCO2e.

But there is one aspect of research that often gets overlooked – and which can have a substantial environmental impact: high performance and cloud computing.

In 2020, the Information and Communication Technologies sector was estimated to have made up between 1.8% and 2.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than aviation (1.9%). In addition to the environmental effects of electricity usage, manufacturing and disposal of hardware, there are also concerns around data centres’ water usage and land footprint.

Professor Michael Inouye said: “While the environmental impact of experimental ‘wet’ labs is more immediately obvious, the impact of algorithms is less clear and often underestimated. While new hardware, lower-energy data centres and more efficient high performance computing systems can help reduce their impact, the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence and data science more generally means their carbon footprint could grow exponentially in coming years if we don’t act now.”

To help address this issue, the team has developed GREENER (Governance, Responsibility, Estimation, Energy and embodied impacts, New collaborations, Education and Research), a set of principles to allow the computational science community to lead the way in sustainable research practices, maximising computational science’s benefit to both humanity and the environment.

Governance and Responsibility

Everyone involved in computational science has a role to play in making the field more sustainable: individual and institutional responsibility is a necessary step to ensure transparency and reduction of greenhouse gas emission.

For example, institutions themselves can be key to managing and expanding centralised data infrastructures, and in ensuring that procurement decisions take into account both the manufacturing and operational footprint of hardware purchases. IT teams in high performance computing (HPC) centres can play a key role, both in terms of training and helping scientists monitor the carbon footprint of their work. Principal Investigators can encourage their teams to think about this issue and give access to suitable training. Funding bodies can influence researchers by requiring estimates of carbon footprints to be included in funding applications.

Estimate and report the energy consumption of algorithms

Estimating and monitoring the carbon footprint of computations identifies inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement.

User-level metrics are crucial to understanding environmental impacts and promoting personal responsibility. ̽��ֱ��financial cost of running computations is often negligible, particularly in academia, and scientists may have the impression of unlimited and inconsequential computing capacity. Quantifying the carbon footprint of individual projects helps raise awareness of the true costs of research.

Tackling Energy and embodied impacts through New collaborations

Minimising carbon intensity – that is, the carbon footprint of producing electricity – is one of the most immediately impactful ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This could involve relocating computations to low-carbon settings and countries, but this needs to be done with equity in mind. Carbon intensities can differ by as much as three orders of magnitude between the top and bottom performing high-income countries (from 0.10 gCO2e/kWh in Iceland to 770 gCO2e/kWh in Australia).

̽��ֱ��footprint of user devices is also a factor: one estimate found that almost three-quarters (72%) of the energy footprint of streaming a video to a laptop is from the laptop, with 23% used in transmission and a mere 5% at the data centre.

Another key consideration is data storage. ̽��ֱ��carbon footprint of storing data depends on numerous factors, but the life cycle footprint of storing one terabyte of data for a year is of the order of 10 kg CO2e. This issue is exacerbated by the duplication of such datasets in order for each institution, and sometimes each research group, to have a copy. Large (hyperscale) data centres are expected to be more energy efficient, but they may also encourage unnecessary increases in the scale of computing (the ‘rebound effect’).

Education and Research

Education is essential to raise awareness of the issues with different stakeholders. Integrating sustainability into computational training courses is a tangible first step toward reducing carbon footprints. Investing in research that will catalyse innovation in the field of environmentally sustainable computational science is a crucial role for funders and institutions to play.

Recent studies found that the most widely-used programming languages in research, such as R and Python, tend to be the least energy efficient ones, highlighting the importance of having trained Research Software Engineers within research groups to ensure that the algorithms used are efficiently implemented. There is also scope to use current tools more efficiently by better understanding and monitoring how coding choices impact carbon footprints.

Dr Lannelongue said: “Computational scientists have a real opportunity to lead the way in sustainability, but this is going to involve a change in our culture and the ways we work. There will need to more transparency, more awareness, better training and resources, and improved policies.

“Cooperation, open science, and equitable access to low-carbon computing facilities will also be crucial. We need to make sure that sustainable solutions work for everyone, as they frequently have the least benefit for populations, often in low- and middle-income countries, who suffer the most from climate change.”

Professor Inouye added: “Everyone in the field – from funders to journals to institutions down to individuals – plays an important role and can, themselves, make a positive impact. We have an immense opportunity to make a change, but the clock is ticking.”

̽��ֱ��research was a collaboration with major stakeholders including Health Data Research UK, EMBL-EBI, Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

*CO2e, or CO2-equivalent, summarises the global warming impacts of a range of greenhouse gases and is the standard metric for carbon footprints, although its accuracy is sometimes debated.

Reference
Lannelongue, L et al. GREENER principles for environmentally sustainable computational science. Nat Comp Sci; 26 June; DOI: 10.1038/s43588-023-00461-y

For more information on energy-related research in Cambridge, please visit Energy IRC, which brings together Cambridge’s research knowledge and expertise, in collaboration with global partners, to create solutions for a sustainable and resilient energy landscape for generations to come.

Cambridge scientists have set out principles for how computational science – which powers discoveries from unveiling the mysteries of the universe to developing treatments to fight cancer to improving our understanding of the human genome, but can have a substantial carbon footprint – can be made more environmentally sustainable.

Science has transformed our understanding of the world around us and has led to great benefits to society. But this has come with a not-insignificant – and not always well understood – impact on the environment

Loic Lannelongue

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Click to save the nation’s digital memory

sjr81 — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 14:53:47 +0000

Regulations coming into force on April 6 will enable six major libraries to collect, preserve and provide long term access to the increasing proportion of the nation’s cultural and intellectual output that appears in digital form – including blogs, e-books and the entire UK web domain.

From this point forward, the British Library, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, and Trinity College Library in Dublin will have the right to receive a copy of every UK electronic publication, on the same basis as they have received print publications such as books, magazines and newspapers for several centuries.

̽��ֱ��regulations, known as legal deposit, will ensure that ephemeral materials like websites can be collected, preserved forever and made available to future generations of researchers, providing the fullest possible record of life and society in the UK in the 21st century for people 50, 100, even 200 or more years in the future.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “I greatly welcome this landmark legislation as it means that Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library can collect and preserve the UK's digital publishing output, particularly that which will support current and future research.”

Culture Minister Ed Vaizey MP said: “Legal deposit arrangements remain vitally important. Preserving and maintaining a record of everything that has been published provides a priceless resource for the researchers of today and the future.

“So it’s right that these long-standing arrangements have now been brought up to date for the 21st century, covering the UK’s digital publications for the first time. ̽��ֱ��Joint Committee on Legal Deposit has worked very successfully in creating practical policies and processes so that digital content can now be effectively archived and our academic and literary heritage preserved, in whatever form it takes.”

̽��ֱ��principle of extending legal deposit beyond print was established with the Legal Deposit Libraries Act of 2003 – the present regulations implement it in practical terms, encompassing electronic publications such as e-journals and e-books, offline (or hand-held) formats like CD-Rom and an initial 4.8 million websites from the UK web domain.

Access to non-print materials, including archived websites, will be offered via on-site reading room facilities at each of the legal deposit libraries. While the initial offering to researchers will be limited in scope, the libraries will gradually increase their capability for managing large-scale deposit, preservation and access over the coming months and years.

By the end of this year, the results of the first live archiving crawl of the UK web domain will be available to researchers, along with tens of thousands of e-journal articles, e-books and other materials.

̽��ֱ��regulations were developed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in conjunction with the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit, which includes representatives from the Legal Deposit Libraries and different sectors of the publishing industry. They establish an agreed approach for the libraries to develop an efficient system for archiving digital publications, while avoiding an unreasonable burden for publishers and protecting the interests of rights-holders.

Angela Mills Wade, Executive Director of the European Publishers Council, Chairman of the UK Publishers Content Forum and Joint Chairman of the Joint Committee on Legal Deposit said: “Capturing our digital heritage for preservation and future research is essential. As publishers were among the first to embrace the opportunities of digital publishing, recognising advantages of dissemination beyond traditional outlets and the potential of technology to drive innovation, we welcome the extension of legal deposit to digital formats and web harvesting.”

Billions of web pages from millions of websites, as well as public Facebook posts and tweets, will be preserved for time immemorial from tomorrow by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library and five other major libraries.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library can collect and preserve the UK's digital publishing output, particularly that which will support current and future research.

Anne Jarvis

Carna Botnet

Graphic showing worldwide Internet usage

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3D microchip created

hps25 — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 13:04:18 +0000

Scientists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have created, for the first time, a new type of microchip which allows information to travel in three dimensions. Currently, microchips can only pass digital information in a very limited way – from either left to right or front to back. ̽��ֱ��research was published today, 31 January, in Nature.

Dr Reinoud Lavrijsen, an author on the paper from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Today’s chips are like bungalows – everything happens on the same floor. We’ve created the stairways allowing information to pass between floors.”

Researchers believe that in the future a 3D microchip would enable additional storage capacity on chips by allowing information to be spread across several layers instead of being compacted into one layer, as is currently the case.

For the research, the Cambridge scientists used a special type of microchip called a spintronic chip which exploits the electron’s tiny magnetic moment or ‘spin’ (unlike the majority of today’s chips which use charge-based electronic technology). Spintronic chips are increasingly being used in computers, and it is widely believed that within the next few years they will become the standard memory chip.

To create the microchip, the researchers used an experimental technique called ‘sputtering’. They effectively made a club-sandwich on a silicon chip of cobalt, platinum and ruthenium atoms. ̽��ֱ��cobalt and platinum atoms store the digital information in a similar way to how a hard disk drive stores data. ̽��ֱ��ruthenium atoms act as messengers, communicating that information between neighbouring layers of cobalt and platinum. Each of the layers is only a few atoms thick.

They then used a laser technique called MOKE to probe the data content of the different layers. As they switched a magnetic field on and off they saw in the MOKE signal the data climbing layer by layer from the bottom of the chip to the top. They then confirmed the results using a different measurement method.

Professor Russell Cowburn, lead researcher of the study from the Cavendish Laboratory, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Physics, said: “Each step on our spintronic staircase is only a few atoms high. I find it amazing that by using nanotechnology not only can we build structures with such precision in the lab but also using advanced laser instruments we can actually see the data climbing this nano-staircase step by step.

“This is a great example of the power of advanced materials science. Traditionally, we would use a series of electronic transistors to move data like this. We’ve been able to achieve the same effect just by combining different basic elements such as cobalt, platinum and ruthenium. This is the 21st century way of building things – harnessing the basic power of elements and materials to give built-in functionality.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the European Research Council, the Isaac Newton Trust, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).

New type of microchip created which not only moves information from left to right and back to front, but up and down as well.

We can actually see the data climbing this nano-staircase step by step.

Professor Russell Cowburn, lead researcher of the study from the Cavendish Laboratory, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Physics

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