Upcoming Computer Science Research Seminar "Machine Learning and the Data Center: A Dangerous Dead End"

Join us for a research seminar with Dr. Nicholas D. Lane, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at St. John's College.  This virtual seminar will be moderated Dr. Reza Rawassizadeh, Assistant Professor of Computer Science. The abstract for "Machine Learning and the Data Center: A Dangerous Dead End" is as follows: The vast majority of machine learning (ML) occurs today in a data center. But there is a very real possibility that in the (near?) future, we will view this situation similarly to how we now view lead paint, fossil fuels and asbestos: a technological means to an end, that was used for a time because, at that stage, we did not have viable alternatives – and we did not fully appreciate the negative externalities that were being caused. Awareness of the unwanted side effects of the current ML data center centric paradigm is building. It couples to ML an alarming carbon footprint, a reliance to biased close-world datasets, serious risks to user privacy – and promotes centralized control by large organizations due to the assumed extreme compute resources. In this talk, I will offer a sketch of preliminary thoughts regarding how a data center free future for ML might come about, and also describe how some of our recent research results and system solutions (including the Flower framework -- http://flower.dev) might offer a foundation along this path.