COVID-19 Imposes Rethinking of Conferencing -- Environmental Impact Assessment of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
This research addresses the carbon footprint problem for the AI community by proposing greener conferencing alternatives, though it is incremental in applying existing environmental assessment methods to this domain.
The study quantified the environmental impact of air travel to major AI conferences and found that virtual conferences are the greenest option, while optimizing conference locations can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 63.9%.
It has been noticed that through COVID-19 greenhouse gas emissions had a sudden reduction. Based on this significant observation, we decided to conduct a research to quantify the impact of scientific conferences' air-travelling, explore and suggest alternative ways for greener conferences to re-duce the global carbon footprint. Specifically, we focused on the most popular conferences for the Artificial Intelligence community based on their scientific impact factor, their scale, and the well-organized proceedings towards measuring the impact of air travelling participation. This is the first time that systematic quantification of a state-of-the-art subject like Artificial Intelligence takes place to define its conferencing footprint in the broader frames of environmental awareness. Our findings highlight that the virtual way is the first on the list of green conferences' conduction although there are serious concerns about it. Alternatives to optimal conferences' location selection have demonstrated savings on air-travelling CO2 emissions of up to 63.9%.