Stony Brook University Computer Science

Prof. Aruna Balasubramanian from Stony Brook University will be giving a talk on "Sustainable NLP: Why We Need Accurate Energy Prediction of ML Models?".

Please find the seminar details below:
Title: Sustainable NLP: Why We Need Accurate Energy Prediction of ML Models?
Date & Time: Wednesday, June 17, 11 AM
Venue: B203

Abstract
Much of the recent transformative advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including ChatGPT, are driven by advances in language models and deep neural networks. However, these advances have come with staggering computational and energy costs. For example, researchers have estimated that training GPT-4 consumed between 51,772,500 and 62GWh that can power 6 million homes for a single day. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss what this level of energy consumption means, from a bird’s-eye view of global carbon emission down to the realities of individual deep learning models. I will then talk about our work on accurately predicting energy consumption of these models and how this is useful, both at the micro-level (i.e., making data centers more efficient) and at the macro-level (i.e., in the context of power grids).

Speaker Bio
Aruna Balasubramanian is an Associate Professor at Stony Brook University (and was a visiting faculty at SUNY Korea in 2023-2024).  She received her Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where her dissertation won the UMass outstanding dissertation award and was the SIGCOMM dissertation award runner up. She works in the area of networked systems. Her current work consists of two threads: (1) efficient and sustainable LLMs, (2) improving the accessibility of smartphones for individuals with disability, and (3) quantum networks. She is the recipient of an IMC test-of-time award, a SIGMOBILE Rockstar award, a Ubicomp best paper award, a VMWare Early Career award, and several Google research awards. She is passionate about improving the diversity in Computer Science and broadening participation. She leads the diversity committee at Stony Brook and is an active member of the N2Women group.