sustainability
Events
AI for Climate Innovation Factory 2025 live pitching session – 1st session
Environmental degradation remains one of the most pressing global challenges, threatening ecosystems, economies, and human well-being worldwide. To address this crisis, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), in collaboration with its partners, is proud to announce the 2025 AI for Climate Action Innovation Factory. This initiative aims to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop innovative solutions that help mitigate environmental impacts and support global adaptation efforts.
The 2025 edition aims to further advance the use of AI in addressing pressing environmental and sustainability challenges, promoting scalable, impactful, and inclusive AI-driven projects that can contribute to meaningful solutions aligned with global priorities and the targets of the Paris Agreement. The finale will take place at COP30 in Brazil, aligning with the conference’s mission to accelerate global environmental action.
Key objectives:
- Identify and support cutting-edge AI-driven solutions to address environmental and sustainability challenges.
- Promote the development and deployment of AI-powered tools that drive measurable progress toward environmental resilience and sustainable development.
- Bring together governments, academia, private sector organizations, startups, and civil society to co-create and scale impactful sustainability-focused solutions.
- Ensure inclusivity by supporting underrepresented groups, including women, youth, and marginalized communities, in contributing to and benefiting from environmental and sustainability initiatives.
- Showcase winning solutions during high-profile events, culminating in a grand finale at COP30 in Brazil, where selected projects will gain global recognition and opportunities for adoption.
Institutions
- AI for Good
ITMC Conference 2025 „Resiliente IT“
Willkommen zur ITMC-Conference 2025
In diesem Jahr steht das Thema „Resiliente IT - Resilienz als Schlüssel für ein krisenfestes und zukunftsfähiges Unternehmen im Spannungsfeld von politischen Entwicklungen, Fachkräftemangel, Klimakrise, Mangel an Diversität und wirtschaftlichen Herausforderungen“ im Zentrum der ITMC-Conference.
Die ITMC-Conference ist die ideale Gelegenheit für Studieninteressierte, die sich für den Masterstudiengang IT-Management und -Consulting (ITMC) an der Universität Hamburg begeistern. Am 2. Juni 2025 laden wir Dich in den Lichthof der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek ein, um einen authentischen Einblick in die Inhalte, Projekte und das Umfeld des Studiengangs zu gewinnen.
Erlebe spannende Keynotes und Vorträge von Expert:innen aus Wissenschaft und Praxis, informiere Dich über aktuelle Trends im IT-Management und Consulting und tausche Dich direkt mit Studierenden, Alumni und Lehrenden aus. Die Konferenz wird von Studierenden des ITMC-Studiengangs organisiert und bietet Dir die perfekte Plattform, um Fragen zu stellen, Kontakte zu knüpfen und herauszufinden, wie das Studium Dich auf eine Karriere in der IT-Welt vorbereitet.
Nutze die Chance, einen der innovativsten IT-Studiengänge kennenzulernen und Teil einer engagierten Community zu werden – wir freuen uns auf Dich!
Institutions
- Fachbereich Informatik, Universität Hamburg
Powering the future: Funding and sustaining Al for humanitarian impact
As AI projects gain traction in the humanitarian sector, securing their funding and long-term sustainability remains a critical challenge. This session explores how AI initiatives can align with the SDGs and address pressing climate concerns, while also examining innovative funding models and cross-sector partnerships. From philanthropic investments to public-private collaborations, join us to uncover strategies for ensuring AI projects not only launch successfully but also endure to create lasting, scalable impact in humanitarian efforts. Participants will gain insights into best practices for funding AI projects and explore case studies showcasing successful funding models and partnerships.
Key Learning Objectives:
- Identify the key challenges in funding and sustaining AI projects in the humanitarian sector.
- Analyze innovative funding models and cross-sector partnerships for AI projects.
- Evaluate the long-term sustainability of AI projects through various funding strategies.
- Develop strategies for securing funding and ensuring the scalability of AI projects in humanitarian efforts.
Target Audience: This event is designed for humanitarian workers at all levels, policymakers, academics, data specialists, communication specialists, and technology experts who are involved in crisis response and interested in the ethical use of AI.
Prerequisites: No prerequisite knowledge is required. Basic understanding of AI and humanitarian principles is recommended.
Institutions
- AI for Good
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. A Fallibilist Approach to AI Value Alignment
This lecture series invites viewpoints from different relevant disciplines to explore how we can preserve and advance human values through the development and use of AI technologies. Key questions include: How does AI impact our fundamental social, political, and economic structures? What does it mean to lead a meaningful life in the AI age? What design and regulatory decisions should we make to ensure digital transformations are fair and sustainable?
Prof. Dr. Ibo van de Poel, Delft University of Technology, NL
Value alignment is important to ensure that AI systems remain aligned with human intentions, preferences, and values. It has been suggested that it can best be achieved by building AI systems that can track preferences or values in real-time. In my talk, I argue against this idea of real-time value alignment. First, I show that the value alignment problem is not unique to AI, but applies to any technology, thus opening up alternative strategies for attaining value alignment. Next, I argue that due to uncertainty about appropriate alignment goals, real-time value alignment may lead to harmful optimization and therefore will likely do more harm than good. Instead, it is better to base value alignment on a fallibilist epistemology, which assumes that complete certainty about the proper target of value alignment is and will remain impossible. Three alternative principles for AI value alignment are proposed: 1) adopt a fallibilist epistemology regarding the target of value alignment; 2) focus on preventing serious misalignments rather than aiming for perfect alignment; 3) retain AI systems under human control even if it comes at the cost of full value alignment.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. About 'The Human' in Artificial Intelligence
For better or worse, the revolutionary potential of AI has reached public consciousness, with a growing recognition of the ways that AI might change how we live and work together. Indeed, the fabric of society is already changing in front of our very eyes, with powerful profiteers of AI rallying behind its supposed inevitability. The AI revolution is afoot and it seems as if there is nothing that we can do about it. However, Donald Trump’s emerging alliance with Silicon Valley’s “Magnificent Seven” provides a potent reason for pause and for sustained reflection on the path we are collectively treading.
To discuss how AI, like any other technology, is part of a societal process of struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, this lecture series brings together experts from philosophy, law, and cognitive science. How are technologies like AI grounded in social processes of knowledge production, design, and innovation? What is the environmental impact of AI systems and what ecological responsibilities fall to providers, politicians, and users? What is the human rights impact of AI technologies deployed in military and security contexts? And what, to speak with Nietzsche, renders AI ‘all too human’ after all?
Join us at our “Taming the Machine” lecture series this summer term to explore with our distinguished guests these and other related questions. To get the latest updates and details how to attend the lectures, please visit http://uhh.de/inf-eit.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. AI and the Future of Work
This lecture series invites viewpoints from different relevant disciplines to explore how we can preserve and advance human values through the development and use of AI technologies. Key questions include: How does AI impact our fundamental social, political, and economic structures? What does it mean to lead a meaningful life in the AI age? What design and regulatory decisions should we make to ensure digital transformations are fair and sustainable?
Prof. Dr. Kate Vredenburgh, London School of Economics, GB
Current AI regulation in the EU and globally focus on trustworthiness and accountability, as seen in the AI Act and AI Liability instruments. Yet, they overlook a critical aspect: environmental sustainability. This talk addresses this gap by examining the ICT sector's significant environmental impact. AI technologies, particularly generative models like GPT-4, contribute substantially to global greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption.
The talk assesses how existing and proposed regulations, including EU environmental laws and the GDPR, can be adapted to prioritize sustainability. It advocates for a comprehensive approach to sustainable AI regulation, beyond mere transparency mechanisms for disclosing AI systems' environmental footprint, as proposed in the EU AI Act. The regulatory toolkit must include co-regulation, sustainability-by-design principles, data usage restrictions, and consumption limits, potentially integrating AI into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. This multidimensional strategy offers a blueprint that can be adapted to other high-emission technologies and infrastructures, such as block chain, the meta-verse, or data centers. Arguably, it is crucial for tackling the twin key transformations of our society: digitization and climate change mitigation.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. AI, Art and Authorship. Perspectives From Ethics and Aesthetics
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. AI, Explainability and Epistemic Dependence
About the lecture
tbd
About the speaker
Jocelyn Maclure is Full Professor of Philosophy and Jarislwosky Chair in Human Nature and Technology at McGill University. His current work addresses various topics in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and in social epistemology. In 2023, he was Mercator Visiting Professor for AI in the Human Context at the University of Bonn. His recent articles appeared in journals such as Minds & Machines, AI & Ethics, AI & Society and Digital Society. He was the president of the Quebec Ethics in Science and Technology Commission—and advisory body of the Quebec Government—from 2017 to 2024. Before turning his attention to the philosophy of AI, he published extensively in moral and political philosophy, including, with Charles Taylor, Secularism and Freedom of Conscience (Harvard University Press (2011). He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.
The talk explores the question of whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can truly create art, or if there is an essential “human factor” in art production. Against the background of AI’s growing capabilities, traditional concepts in art theory like authorship are reconsidered. It is argued that authorship is a necessary condition for art, while aesthetic responsibility is at least a necessary condition for authorship of artworks. Although AI can function as an aesthetic agent, it cannot bear aesthetic responsibility. Therefore, it can neither on its own nor in cooperation with humans be the author of artworks. However, AI is able to produce objects that are in their manifest properties indistinguishable from works of art, I will speak of “fake art.” It will be shown to what extent the massive occurrence of AI-generated fake art has a detrimental effect on art practice.Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. AI, Human Rights and the Surveillance State
For better or worse, the revolutionary potential of AI has reached public consciousness, with a growing recognition of the ways that AI might change how we live and work together. Indeed, the fabric of society is already changing in front of our very eyes, with powerful profiteers of AI rallying behind its supposed inevitability. The AI revolution is afoot and it seems as if there is nothing that we can do about it. However, Donald Trump’s emerging alliance with Silicon Valley’s “Magnificent Seven” provides a potent reason for pause and for sustained reflection on the path we are collectively treading.
To discuss how AI, like any other technology, is part of a societal process of struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, this lecture series brings together experts from philosophy, law, and cognitive science. How are technologies like AI grounded in social processes of knowledge production, design, and innovation? What is the environmental impact of AI systems and what ecological responsibilities fall to providers, politicians, and users? What is the human rights impact of AI technologies deployed in military and security contexts? And what, to speak with Nietzsche, renders AI ‘all too human’ after all?
Join us at our “Taming the Machine” lecture series this summer term to explore with our distinguished guests these and other related questions. To get the latest updates and details how to attend the lectures, please visit http://uhh.de/inf-eit.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Creativity & AI
For better or worse, the revolutionary potential of AI has reached public consciousness, with a growing recognition of the ways that AI might change how we live and work together. Indeed, the fabric of society is already changing in front of our very eyes, with powerful profiteers of AI rallying behind its supposed inevitability. The AI revolution is afoot and it seems as if there is nothing that we can do about it. However, Donald Trump’s emerging alliance with Silicon Valley’s “Magnificent Seven” provides a potent reason for pause and for sustained reflection on the path we are collectively treading.
To discuss how AI, like any other technology, is part of a societal process of struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, this lecture series brings together experts from philosophy, law, and cognitive science. How are technologies like AI grounded in social processes of knowledge production, design, and innovation? What is the environmental impact of AI systems and what ecological responsibilities fall to providers, politicians, and users? What is the human rights impact of AI technologies deployed in military and security contexts? And what, to speak with Nietzsche, renders AI ‘all too human’ after all?
Join us at our “Taming the Machine” lecture series this summer term to explore with our distinguished guests these and other related questions. To get the latest updates and details how to attend the lectures, please visit http://uhh.de/inf-eit.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Frontier AI Regulation: from Trustworthiness to Sustainability
This lecture series invites viewpoints from different relevant disciplines to explore how we can preserve and advance human values through the development and use of AI technologies. Key questions include: How does AI impact our fundamental social, political, and economic structures? What does it mean to lead a meaningful life in the AI age? What design and regulatory decisions should we make to ensure digital transformations are fair and sustainable?
Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), DE
Current AI regulation in the EU and globally focus on trustworthiness and accountability, as seen in the AI Act and AI Liability instruments. Yet, they overlook a critical aspect: environmental sustainability. This talk addresses this gap by examining the ICT sector's significant environmental impact. AI technologies, particularly generative models like GPT-4, contribute substantially to global greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption.
The talk assesses how existing and proposed regulations, including EU environmental laws and the GDPR, can be adapted to prioritize sustainability. It advocates for a comprehensive approach to sustainable AI regulation, beyond mere transparency mechanisms for disclosing AI systems' environmental footprint, as proposed in the EU AI Act. The regulatory toolkit must include co-regulation, sustainability-by-design principles, data usage restrictions, and consumption limits, potentially integrating AI into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. This multidimensional strategy offers a blueprint that can be adapted to other high-emission technologies and infrastructures, such as block chain, the meta-verse, or data centers. Arguably, it is crucial for tackling the twin key transformations of our society: digitization and climate change mitigation.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Frontier AI Regulation: from Trustworthiness to Sustainability
Taming the Machines — Horizons of Artificial Intelligence. The Ethics in Information Technology Public Lecture Series
This summer‘s „Taming the Machine“ lecture series sheds light on the ethical, political, legal, and societal dimensions of Artificial Intelligence (AI).This lecture series brings together perspectives from ethics, politics, law, geography, and media studies to assess the potential for preserving and developing human values in the design, dissemination, and application of AI technologies. How does AI challenge our most fundamental social, political, and economic institutions? How can we bolster (or even improve) them in times of technological disruption? What regulations are needed to render AI environments fairer and more transparent? What needs to be done to make them more sustainable? In what sense could (and even should) we hold AI accountable?
To explore these and other related questions, this public lecture series invites distinguished international researchers to present and discuss their work. To get the latest updates and details how to attend the lectures, please visit http://uhh.de/inf-eit.
Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), D
The talk assesses how existing and proposed regulations, including EU environmental laws and the GDPR, can be adapted to prioritize sustainability. It advocates for a comprehensive approach to sustainable AI regulation, beyond mere transparency mechanisms for disclosing AI systems' environmental footprint, as proposed in the EU AI Act. The regulatory toolkit must include co-regulation, sustainability-by-design principles, data usage restrictions, and consumption limits, potentially integrating AI into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. This multidimensional strategy offers a blueprint that can be adapted to other high-emission technologies and infrastructures, such as block chain, the meta-verse, or data centers. Arguably, it is crucial for tackling the twin key transformations of our society: digitization and climate change mitigation.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. How to Achieve Digital Sovereignty in Europe?
Prof. Dr. José van Dijck (Utrecht University, NL)
The growing dominance of two global platform ecosystems has left European countries to rely on American and Chinese digitale infrastructures. This dependency is not just affecting markets and labor relations, but is also transforming social practices, and affecting democracies. While two large ecosystems fight for information control in the global online world, the European perspective on digital infrastructures is focused on regulation rather than on building alternatives. With emerging technologies such as generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard) and geopolitical changes, the infrastructural perspective becomes more poignant. How can Europe achieve sovereignty in the digital world?
This lecture takes up two questions. First, what public values are fundamental to Europe’s platform societies? Values such as privacy, security, transparency, equality, public trust, and (institutional, professional) autonomy are important principles upon which the design of platform architectures should be based. Second, what are the responsibilities of companies, governments, and citizens in building an alternative, sustainable platform ecosystem based on those public values?
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Implicit Knowledge in Human-Machine Relationships. A Philosophical Investigation
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Misinformation
For better or worse, the revolutionary potential of AI has reached public consciousness, with a growing recognition of the ways that AI might change how we live and work together. Indeed, the fabric of society is already changing in front of our very eyes, with powerful profiteers of AI rallying behind its supposed inevitability. The AI revolution is afoot and it seems as if there is nothing that we can do about it. However, Donald Trump’s emerging alliance with Silicon Valley’s “Magnificent Seven” provides a potent reason for pause and for sustained reflection on the path we are collectively treading.
To discuss how AI, like any other technology, is part of a societal process of struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, this lecture series brings together experts from philosophy, law, and cognitive science. How are technologies like AI grounded in social processes of knowledge production, design, and innovation? What is the environmental impact of AI systems and what ecological responsibilities fall to providers, politicians, and users? What is the human rights impact of AI technologies deployed in military and security contexts? And what, to speak with Nietzsche, renders AI ‘all too human’ after all?
Join us at our “Taming the Machine” lecture series this summer term to explore with our distinguished guests these and other related questions. To get the latest updates and details how to attend the lectures, please visit http://uhh.de/inf-eit.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Repairing AI for Environmental Justice
Aimee van Wynsberghe is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Applied Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bonn in Germany. Aimee is director of the Institute for Science and Ethics and the Bonn Sustainable AI lab. She is co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and a member of the European Commission's High-Level Expert Group on AI. In each of her roles, Aimee works to uncover the ethical risks associated with emerging robotics and AI. Aimee’s current research, funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, brings attention to the sustainability of AI by studying the hidden environmental costs of developing and using AI.
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. Risk Ethics and Big Tech Business
Prof. Dr. Sven Ove Hansson (Uppsala University, SE)
About the lecture
tbd
Institutions- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. The Future of Prediction. Algorithmic Forecast in Science and Society
This lecture series invites viewpoints from different relevant disciplines to explore how we can preserve and advance human values through the development and use of AI technologies. Key questions include: How does AI impact our fundamental social, political, and economic structures? What does it mean to lead a meaningful life in the AI age? What design and regulatory decisions should we make to ensure digital transformations are fair and sustainable?
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Elena Esposito, Universität Bielefeld, DE
Institutions
- UHH
Public Lecture Series: Taming the Machines. What, if anything, are convivial technologies?
Prof. Dr. Darian Meacham (Maastricht University, NL)
This talk will focus on how this distinction between convivial and monopolistic (or non-convivial) technologies can support a critical phenomenology of technology. I will argue that Gorz attempts to do just this, but that his development of the “convivial – un-convivial” distinction in terms of a broader account of “autonomy” vs “heteronomy” would benefit from a more phenomenologically grounded account of autonomy. I will pose (and try to address) the question of whether a more embodied account of autonomy, such as developed within the context of enactive approaches to cognition would serve such an aim.
A third step will be to ask if and how an enactively enriched notion of autonomy, when situated within the critique of technology and economic rationality, can contribute to the development of programmes for “concrete utopias”.
Institutions
- UHH
Understanding past climate events and trends to constrain near-future climate risk
The global mean surface temperature record combining sea surface and near-surface air data is central to understanding climate variability and change. Understanding the past record also helps constrain uncertainty in future climate projections. In my talk, I will present a recent study (Sippel et al., 2024, Nature, doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08230-1) that refines our view of the historical record and explore its implications for near-future climate risk.
Past temperature record: The early temperature record (before ~1950) remains uncertain due to evolving methods, limited documentation, and sparse coverage. Independent reconstructions show that historical ocean temperatures were likely measured too cold by about 0.26 °C compared to land estimates despite strong agreement in other periods. This cold bias cannot be explained by natural variability; multiple lines of evidence (climate attribution, timescale analysis, coastal data, palaeoclimate records) support a substantial cold bias in early ocean records. While overall warming since the mid-19th century is unchanged, correcting the bias reduces early-20th-century warming trends, lowers global decadal variability, and brings models and observations into closer alignment.
Constraining climate risk: I will close my talk by discussing how these findings sharpen near-future temperature projections and our understanding of climate risk; and furthermore how new AI methods may provide an even clearer picture of past climate and near-future climate risk.
Institutions
- AI for Good
Universität Hamburg
Adeline Scharfenberg