Francesca Dominici: AI's Climate Catch-22
Date and Time
Location
Francesca Dominici begins discussion of this month's faculty seminar on Knowledge Production and the University in the Age of AI. Her talk is titled "AI's Climate Catch-22: Can We Compute Our Way to Healthy Adaptation?" Faculty and researchers from all Harvard schools welcome. Registration required.
This seminar is sponsored by the Department of the History of Science and by the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
AI’s Climate Catch‑22: Can We Compute Our Way to Healthy Adaptation?
Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing research, education, and business—unlocking unprecedented opportunities across climate, health, and beyond. In our lab, we’re developing the first foundation model for healthy climate adaptation, pre-trained on the entire national healthcare system and enriched with nationwide Census, weather, and pollution data. This model enables powerful “what-if” scenario forecasting, using synthetic ground-truth data to validate counterfactual predictions and guide healthy interventions. Yet, this AI-driven progress comes at a cost: energy-hungry data centers power these advances, raising concerns about their environmental footprint and the paradox of AI’s growing electricity demand in a world striving to reduce fossil fuel reliance. In this talk, I’ll share insights from our work and explore AI's uncertain, double-edged role in the fight against climate change.
Francesca Dominici
Francesca Dominici, PhD is the Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative at Harvard University and the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In 2024, she made the TIME100Health list for 2024: TIME100 Most Influential People in Global Health . She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the International Society of Mathematical Statistics. She leads an interdisciplinary group of scientists to address important questions in environmental health science, climate change, and health policy. Dr. Dominici has provided the scientific community and policymakers with comprehensive and compelling evidence on the adverse health effects of air pollution, noise pollution, and climate change. Her studies have directly and routinely impacted air quality policy.
Seminar Readings
Francesca Dominici has precirculated the following articles for discussion.
Knowledge Production and the University in the Age of AI
At this time of seismic change for the university, and the research systems of which we are a central part, it is hard to find a moment to pause and ask: how should we make knowledge in the future?
Seminar Sponsors
This seminar is co-sponsored by the Department of the History of Science and the Harvard Data Science Initiative.
