报告题目：

Safe and Sustainable Artificial Intelligence

报告时间：2026年3月31日上午10:00-11:20

报告地点：大连理工大学开发区校区综合楼204会议室

报告人：Dr. Varun Ojha, Newcastle University

报告内容（摘要）：

Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms have become an inevitable part of our lives and are so pervasive that users often engage with them unconsciously. However, AI systems have advantages and drawbacks. The significant concerns are safety and sustainability. AI models have been found vulnerable to sophisticated malicious attacks, unintentional changes, omissions of context in training data, sensor ageing, changes in the training environment, and other unforeseen circumstances. This makes edge AI applications—such as smartphones and cars—susceptible to defects in training data and AI models. Our research in safeguarding AI focuses on protecting data integrity and the quality of learning associated with AI algorithms when they are exposed to cyberattacks in edge computing environments and in federated learning. Similarly, AI energy demand is outpacing global energy production. At the current rate, AI will consume more energy than the world can produce by 2050. AI energy demand has catastrophic environmental impacts. The energy sustainability of AI has become a crucial challenge worldwide. While most AI energy consumption comes from training, with ~50 billion edge devices worldwide, AI inference energy efficiency will significantly support overall AI energy sustainability. Our research aims to make AI resources more efficient through quantisation, pruning, distillation, and sparse model training.

报告人简介：

Dr Varun Ojha is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computing, Newcastle University. He is Co-Investigator on the UKRI-funded National Edge AI Hub. He is the lead of Safe AI at the Centre for AI Safety. He is the Head of the Intelligent Systems Research Group at Newcastle University. In the past, Dr Ojha served as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Reading, UK, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Zurich, Switzerland. Before this, Dr Ojha was a Marie Curie Fellow (funded by the European Commission) at the Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic. He works in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, Sparsity, Explainability, and Security. He innovates in Deep Learning, Neural Networks, Machine Learning, and Data Science.