🧩Collage

Fondo Italiano per la Scienza (FIS) - Starting Grant

Current unsustainable AI monolithic approach: build, use and throw away (left); COLLAGE main approach (right): incrementally build, share and re-use knowledge and skills as a set of compositional building blocks that can be efficiently and effectively composed, adapted, and ultimately used for the specific task at hand in a decentralized network of AI applications.

COntinual, DecentraLized CompositionaLity for Sustainable Artificial IntelliGEnce (COLLAGE)

Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially through its recent machine learning developments has shown ground-breaking impacts on problems even unthinkable to solve a few decades ago. However, AI solutions nowadays often require significant amounts of resources to be created, used and maintained over time, showing dramatic issues in terms of efficiency, scalability and ultimately sustainability. In this project proposal, I focus on the development of AI methodologies that could dramatically reduce the computational and memory resources needed to develop and maintain them over time.

COLLAGE approach is based on the fundamental concept of “reusability” with the main objective of developing a continual, decentralized, compositional building system for Sustainable AI solutions both on a methodological and software engineering level. I plan to support this main objective through the buildout of a scientific foundation on AI solutions that can be incrementally built and adapted over time, the creation of decentralized protocols to share and re-use knowledge across different applications and compositionality methodologies to create new AI solutions starting from existing ones.

COLLAGE represents a non-incremental, groundbreaking shift in the context of Sustainable AI from an application-centric perspective tailored for specific use-cases to a structural and general sustainable approach by design. Despite its potentially disruptive impact, its feasibility is supported by initial promising results I developed and evidence from related fields. Ultimately, COLLAGE methodologies and results at the end of the project, validated through a proof-of-concept in the context of a decentralized “AI for Flood Forecasting" application in Europe, will show an alternative, more democratic and effective path towards the definition of a circular economy for AI development and applications.