The second BIFOLD Weizenbaum Summer School took place from September 11-15, 2023, at the TU Campus EUREF in Berlin Schöneberg. The school focused on the overarching theme of "AI and environmental sustainability", exploring the complex relationship between AI and sustainability, in particular AI or machine learning as tools for sustainable development. The event was jointly organized by the BIFOLD Graduate School and the research group "Digitalization, Sustainability and Participation" at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. Participants and speakers from BIFOLD, Lamarr, MCML (all from the network of German Centers of Excellence for AI), the Weizenbaum Institute, TU Berlin and other universities and research institutes in Germany and Europe discussed Machine Learning, Data Management and the impact of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence on society and sustainability.
The summer school gave young researchers from different scientific disciplines the unique opportunity to learn about other fields of work and methods thereby gaining a new perspective on their own work. They listened to keynote speeches from areas of social sciences, machine learning and data management and worked together in mixed groups on the development of sustainable AI applications.
Keynotes focused on the question of how the economic interests of companies in e-commerce can be reconciled with sustainability goals through efficient optimization of recommendation systems (Sebastian Schelter, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), the cutting-edge XAI technique known as Concept Relevance Propagation (CRP), which explains individual predictions in terms of human-understandable concepts (Wojciech Samek, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute & BIFOLD) and on power asymmetries, exploitation and social inequality and the dimensions of sustainability in the context of today's AI (Rainer Mühlhoff, Osnabrück University).