Three-day hackathon explores methods for making artificial intelligence faster and more sustainable.
February 11, 2020

Mohammad Haft-Javaherian planned to spend an hour at the Green AI Hackathon — just long enough to get acquainted with MIT’s new supercomputer, Satori. Three days later, he walked away with $1,000 for his winning strategy to shrink the carbon footprint of artificial intelligence models trained to detect heart disease. 

“I never thought about the kilowatt-hours I was using,” he says. “But this hackathon gave me a chance to look at my carbon footprint and find ways to trade a small amount of model accuracy for big energy savings.” 

Haft-Javaherian was among six teams to earn prizes at a hackathon co-sponsored by the MIT Research Computing Project and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Jan. 28-30. The event was meant to familiarize students with Satori, the computing cluster IBM donated to MIT last year, and to inspire new techniques for building energy-efficient AI models that put less planet-warming carbon dioxide into the air.