Shaolei Ren

Responsible AI for a resilient, sustainable and equitable future

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E-mail: shaolei@ucr.edu

I am an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, where I am also a cooperating faculty member in the Computer Science and Engineering department. My research focuses on responsible AI for a resilient, sustainable and equitable future.

I am broadly interested in advancing AI’s social and environmental responsibility to serve and benefit society in an ethical manner, including building AI systems with minimum resource usage and environmental costs on society (especially in capacity constrained communities grappling with energy and climate change challenges), advancing public health equity, and safeguarding AI for equitable and robust deployment in high-stakes environments. Towards this goal, I study both algorithmic foundations and empirical methodologies, centered on:

I received the 2015 NSF CAREER award and paper awards from multiple conferences, including ACM e-Energy 2024 and 2016, the flagship conference of the ACM SIG on Energy Systems and Informatics, for my research on computational sustainability. I have also writen semitechnical articles for multiple magzines and organizations such as Harvard Business Review and OECD AI Policy Observatory. Occasionally, I share my research findings on policy forums, public events and media/television, such as expert panels organized by UN Environment Programme, WSJ (one, two), CNBC (one, two), LA Times (one, two, three), Politico, NPR, BBC, EuroNews, and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). I was a speaker at TED AI Vienna, Europe’s first TED conference on AI. I currently serve on the steering committee of the US Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Project for Water Security.

My research on socially and environmentally responsible computing has pushed forward the field and generated broader impacts in various ways, including:

To prospective students: I have multiple openings available for graduate students with full financial support (in either ECE or CSE department). Students with interests in AI, networks, optimization, machine learning, or other relevant areas are welcome to contact me.

news

09/2024
I'm glad to share four recent papers accepted by SIGMETRICS'25 and NeurIPS'24. (1) The SIGMETRICS'25 paper "Learning-Augmented Decentralized Online Convex Optimization in Networks" proposes a novel algorithm to provably robustify machine learning predictions for decentralized optimization in networks. (2) The NeurIPS'24 paper "Bileve: Securing Text Provenance in Large Language Models Against Spoofing with Bi-level Signature" proposes a novel anti-spoofing watermarking method to safeguard LLM-generated content. (3) The NeurIPS'24 paper "Online Budgeted Matching with General Bids" proposes provably-competitive online algorithms for budgeted matching with arbitrary bid sizes. (4) The NeurIPS'24 paper "Safe Exploitative Play in Stochastic Bayesian Games with Untrusted Type Beliefs" quantifies the impact of potentially incorrect type beliefs on an agent's payoff in Bayesian games.
08/2024
I gave an invited talk on AI's environmental footprint at the NSF Workshop on Sustainable Computing: AI, Water, and Biodiversity. Check out my two sets of slides: one and two.
07/2024
Our paper "Making AI Less Thirsty" has been accepted by Communications of the ACM! Check out the preprint version.
07/2024
Our article "The Uneven Distribution of AI’s Environmental Impacts" was published on Harvard Business Review.
06/2024
Our paper "A Dataset for Research on Water Sustainability" received the Best Notes Paper Award (1 out of 40 submissions in the notes paper category) from ACM e-Energy'24, the annual conference of ACM SIGEnergy. Our other paper "CAFE: Carbon-Aware Federated Learning in Geographically Distributed Data Centers" received the Best Paper Nomination (4 out of 110 submissions) from ACM e-Energy'24.
05/2024
Our new paper "Building Socially-Equitable Public Models" has been accepted by ICML'24! Motivated by equitable sustainability, our research embraces social fairness by prioritizing otherwise disadvantaged agents served by AI models in a variety of applications including climate change mitigation, carbon-aware computing, and transportation electrification.
01/2024
I'm glad to share two recent papers on responsible AI. (1) "Online Allocation with Replenishable Budgets: Worst Case and Beyond" accepted by SIGMETRICS'24! This paper studies online allocation with replenishable budgets, a classic versatile model with many applications including sustainable AI powered by renewables. It proposes the first competitive algorithm with robustness guarantees and the first learning-augmented algorithm for average performance improvement. (2) "ArchLock: Locking DNN Transferability at the Architecture Level with a Zero-Cost Binary Predictor" accepted by ICLR'24! This paper designs novel neural architectures to mitigate AI model misuse.

recent highlights

  1. CACM
    Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, and Shaolei Ren
    Communications of the ACM (accepted), 2024
  2. SIGMETRICS
    Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Adam Wierman, and Shaolei Ren
    SIGMETRICS, 2025
  3. NeurIPS
    Tong Zhou, Xuandong Zhao, Xiaolin Xu, and Shaolei Ren
    NeruIPS, 2024
  4. ICML
    Yejia Liu, Jianyi Yang, Pengfei Li, Tongxin Li, and Shaolei Ren
    ICML, 2024
  5. SIGMETRICS
    Jianyi Yang, Pengfei Li, Mohammad J. Islam, and Shaolei Ren
    SIGMETRICS, 2024
  6. NeurIPS
    Jianyi Yang, Pengfei Li, Adam Wierman, and Shaolei Ren
    NeurIPS, 2024
  7. e-Energy
    Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Adam Wierman, and Shaolei Ren
    e-Energy, 2024
  8. e-Energy
    Pranjol Sen Gupta, Md Rajib Hossen, Pengfei Li, Shaolei Ren, and Mohammad A. Islam
    e-Energy, 2024 (Best Notes Paper Award)
  9. HotCarbon
    Yejia Liu, Pengfei Li, Daniel Wong, and Shaolei Ren
    HotCarbon, 2024
  10. HotEthics
    Pengfei Li, Yejia Liu, Jianyi Yang, and Shaolei Ren
    HotEthics, 2024
  11. NeurIPS
    Jianyi Yang, Pengfei Li, Tongxin Li, Adam Wierman, and Shaolei Ren
    NeurIPS, 2023
  12. NeurIPS
    Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Adam Wierman, and Shaolei Ren
    NeurIPS, 2023
  13. ASPLOS
    Nuntipat Narkthong, Shijin Duan, Shaolei Ren, and Xiaolin Xu
    ASPLOS, 2024
  14. ICML
    Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, and Shaolei Ren
    ICML, 2023
  15. SIGMETRICS
    Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, and Shaolei Ren
    SIGMETRICS, 2022
  16. SIGMETRICS
    Bingqian Lu, Jianyi Yang, Weiwen Jiang, Yiyu Shi, and Shaolei Ren
    SIGMETRICS, 2022

societal impacts

Research plays a critical role in the advancement of society. Our research pushes forward the boundaries of the existing literature by uncovering and addressing water sustainability and environmental equity in networked AI/computing systems. In addition, our research on AI sustainability and equity has extended well beyond academic publications and generated broader societal impacts in various ways. It advances holistic awareness and understanding of sustainability and equity among the public, through coverage by ~1,000 major news outlets in ~100 countries, including The Associated Press (also republished in ABC News, Fortune, The Hill, etc.), The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, CBS News, Bloomberg, Fox News, CBC, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, New Scientist, Newsweek and The Atlantic, among many others. See the societal impact page for more.

Our research has also been cited/featured by international organizations, think tanks, and government agencies, including United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, Nature, Communications of the ACM, The U.S. National AI Advisory Committee (in the statement "Rationales, Mechanisms, and Challenges to Regulating AI"), US Special Competitive Studies Project, Centre for the Governance of AI, MIT Sloan Management Review, Yale Environment 360, Stanford Human-Centered AI, Harvard Business Review, Responsible AI Institute, Center for Democracy and Technology, Global Water Forum, The Rockefeller Foundation, AI Now Institute, The State University of New York (SUNY), Rathenau Instituut in The Netherlands, Green Software Foundation, UW Health Sciences Library, The Living Library at NYU, Montreal AI Ethics Institute, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Johns Hopkins SAIS Perspectives, Forbrukerradet (Consumer Council, a Norwegian government agency), H2O Radio, TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Institution of Turkey), Algorithmen furs Gemeinwohl (Algorithms for the Common Good) in Germany, Česká Národní Banka (Czech National Bank), Centrum für Europäische Politik (Centre for European Policy), Greenpeace, Allianz, Ireland's Education Yearbook, Good in Tech, Rizzoli Education, Zentrum für Vertrauenswürdige Künstliche Intelligenz (The Center for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence), and UTS Human Technology Institute in Australia, among others.

education

08/2008 -- 07/2012
University of California, Los Angeles
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Mihaela van der Schaar (now with the University of Cambridge)
09/2006 -- 08/2008
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
M.Phil. in Electronic and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Khaled B. Letaief
09/2002 -- 07/2006
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
B.E. in Electronics and Information Engineering

employment

07/2015 -- Present
University of California, Riverside
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Cooperating Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (07/2015--06/2019)
08/2012 -- 06/2015
Florida International University
Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Sciences

professional services

I frequently serve on the technical program committee of ACM SIGMETRICS, ACM e-Energy, and major AI conferences such as NeurIPS and ICML. I am/was an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems, IEEE Systems Journal, and IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking. I have also served as a guest editor for special issues in IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing and Performance Evaluation.

contact

Shaolei Ren
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521, United States

Office: Winston Chung Hall 319
Phone: 951-827-2260
E-mail: shaolei@ucr.edu