Shaolei Ren
Responsible AI for a resilient, sustainable and equitable future
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, public health impact, and environmental costs, 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:
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Health-informed AI: Quantifying and minimizing the public health impact of AI data centers and leveraing AI to improve public health. Please check out our new paper “The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI. More results will be posted soon!
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AI and sustainability: Developing principled methodologies to measure and minimize AI’s resource usage and lifecycle environmental footprint (Communications of the ACM, e-Energy’24a, e-Energy’24b, ASPLOS’24, SIGMETRICS’22a, OECD AI (perspective article))
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Safe decision-making: Robustifying machine learning predictions in highly dynamic, uncertain, and/or adversarial environments such as intermittent computing systems and AI content generation (SIGMETRICS’25, SIGMETRICS’24, NeurIPS’24a, NeurIPS’24b, NeurIPS’23a, NeurIPS’23b, ICML’23, ICLR’24, SIGMETRICS’22b)
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Algorithmic fairness: Building equitable AI to tackle societal challenges such as public healthy equity and climate change (ICML’24, e-Energy’24c, Harvard Business Review (perspective article))
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, three), CNBC (one, two), LA Times (one, two, three), Politico, NPR, BBC, EuroNews, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), and CACM (one, two). 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:
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Informing AI policies and ethics: Featured in the United Nations World Water Development Report 2024 (Chapter 10.1 “Science, Technology and Innovation”),United Nations Digital Economy Report 2024 (published by UN Trade and Development), and International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (commissioned by the UK government), and included in AI ethics and governance guidance of the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), World Trade Organization (WTO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Economic Forum, Organizacion de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI, or Organization of Ibero-American States), Government of Canada, Government of The Netherlands, Innovate UK (UK’s national innovation agency), UK Parliament (The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee), UK Government, and Stanford Human-Centered AI (Stanford HAI), among others.
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Advancing K-12 education: Included in international and U.S. high-school course materials offered by Financial Times to nearly 5,000 schools worldwide, among others.
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Impacting industries: Leading to the industry’s first real-time water footprint reporting tool for computing systems, and influencing IBM’s AI risk atlas (blog) on sustainable AI, among others.
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Fostering public awareness of responsible AI: Through coverage by more than 1,000 major news outlets in ~100 countries such as The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and Nature.
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
recent highlights
- Preprint
- CACMCommunications of the ACM, 2024 (accepted)
- SIGMETRICS
- ICML
- SIGMETRICS
- NeurIPS
- CACMCommunications of the ACM, 2024 (*equal contribution, accepted)
- e-Energy
- e-Energye-Energy, 2024 (Best Notes Paper Award)
- HotCarbon
- HotEthics
- NeurIPS
- NeurIPS
- SIGMETRICS
- SIGMETRICS
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
University of California, Los Angeles
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Mihaela van der Schaar (now with the University of Cambridge)
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
M.Phil. in Electronic and Computer Engineering
Advisor: Khaled B. Letaief
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
B.E. in Electronics and Information Engineering
employment
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)
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 RenDepartment 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