Green and fair

What AI has to do with the environment and feminism

A few clicks of the mouse, and the coordinates are placed. They mark the border between glacier ice and the open ocean, known as the calving front. “I want to train the program to recognize this line reliably in radar images,” explains Nora Gourmelon. “The less clearly defined contrast makes this much harder to do than with photographs, for example.” If necessary, the computer science expert also dives deep into the source text of the program, where she is entirely in her element.

Nora Gourmelon, who was born in Erlangen, is a doctoral candidate at the Pattern Recognition Lab at FAU. She decided to study computer science as she wanted to develop climate simulations and find out all about the basic methods required for doing so. “Even at school, I realized that I wanted to use computer science to protect our planet in the long term,” she explains. In her Master’s thesis, she focused on the automated assessment of water meter data in order to be able to gain information about the drinking water consumption of private households. Later, she worked with a team to develop a program that automatically identifies and counts seabirds on aerial images. This monitoring provides information on which species are threatened with extinction or whether birds change their routes over time as a result of human influence, such as street noise.

For her research into “green AI”, the name she has chosen for her research focus, Nora Gourmelon won the award from the German Informatics Society as the AI newcomer of the year in the area of nature and life sciences. Once she has successfully completed her doctoral thesis, a further tool for automatically tracking ice and glacier movements will be available for climate research, allowing more accurate models of climate change to be made.

AI must not perpetuate unjustness

Eva Gengler would also like to use AI to do good. “I have been focusing for several years now on the influence of power structures on the development, use, and decisions of AI, both in society and in companies,” says Gengler. “There are major distortions, especially in data, that go hand in hand with systematic discrimination against marginalized people. We must not allow AI to strengthen such imbalances of power.”

A prominent example of such distortions was delivered a few years ago by a global player in the online retail business, who relied on artificial intelligence for help in assessing resumés. It turned out that AI systematically discarded resumés from women. “AI had learned that IT positions are predominantly filled by men,” Gengler explained. “It therefore concluded that men were the better choice for jobs such as these.”

Insights from an insider

Eva Gengler is not only a researcher who views the issue from the outside. Whilst studying business administration at FAU, she worked on various IT projects at well-known companies. Later, she worked as an IT consultant, becoming involved, for example, in digitalizing a Finnish gas company. After that, she became a business analyst and manager in a spin-off from a large insurance company. “A lot of people would have used this as a springboard into upper management,” explains Gengler. “However, for me it became increasingly important to use my experience to protect the rights of marginalized people in particular.”

In 2021, Gengler, who was born and brought up in Nuremberg, became self-employed and worked in projects combating the discrimination of women. She is also a member of the board of erfolgsfaktor FRAU – an association that stands up for women’s rights in business. Gengler is one of the founding members of FemAI, a think-tank on the topic of feminist AI, and the consulting firm enableYou that supports organizations in their digital transformation, using creative new work concepts.

Return to FAU

For her doctoral thesis, the self-acclaimed passionate feminist returned to FAU. She is a doctoral candidate in the doctoral program “Business and Human Rights: Governance Challenges in a Complex World”, and is a research associate at the Schöller Endowed Chair of Information Systems. In her research, she focuses on the central issue of how feminist AI can counteract the discrimination of marginalized people.

by Matthias Münch

This article is part of the FAU Magazin

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