The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the third webinar in the Community Chat series: Powering the Solution: Balancing Computing’s Energy Demands with Its Contributions to Sustainability. Join the authors of the recent Communications of the ACM (CACM) opinion article “Balancing Sustainable Computing and Computing for Sustainability” for a conversation about the two sides of computing’s relationship with the environment: the growing energy demands of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC), and the role those same technologies play in solving environmental problems.
Guest Speakers Share Their Expertise
In this one-hour Zoom webinar and Q&A moderated by article author Michela Taufer (University of Tennessee Knoxville), hear key findings from the article alongside three short talks centered around different aspects of the sustainability conversation.
- Chandra Krintz, Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will open with a look at agriculture and ecology, and what balancing computing’s demands against broader societal needs looks like in applied environmental research.
- Ana Radovanovic, Senior Staff Research Scientist and Technical Lead for Energy Analytics and Carbon Aware Computing at Google, will follow with carbon-aware scheduling and how industry is thinking through the same balance. She previously led the team behind Google’s Carbon-Intelligent Computing System, which shifts flexible computing workloads to times and places where cleaner power is available.
- Adam Wierman, Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, will close with a talk on the community impact of data centers, and whether they are a burden or an asset to the communities that host them.
All speakers will then be available for questions from the audience during a Q&A, joined by the other authors of the article:
- Michela Taufer, University of Tennessee Knoxville
- Elizabeth Bradley, University of Colorado Boulder
- Tevfik Kosar, University at Buffalo
- Siddharth Parida, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
- Masood Parvania, University of Utah
- Eve Schooler, University of Oxford
- Bronis R. de Supinski, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Join Us
Date: Thursday, October 8, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM ET
The question around computing’s energy usage has become a global one. This is your chance to hear directly from the experts and make your voice heard. Use the link below to register for the webinar, and feel free to submit questions ahead of time.
Can’t make it? Register anyway and CCC will send you the recording afterward. We hope to see you there!
Register Here
Tune in to the CCC LinkedIn Showcase Page for updates and more Community Chats like this. Stay connected with CCC for the latest insights, publications, and opportunities to engage by subscribing here.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award Nos. 2300842 and 2619366. These awards support the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a programmatic committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
