Draft:Sasha Luccioni

Sasha (Alexandra) Luccioni (born Alexandra Vorobyova) is a computer scientist who works on computational sustainability and algorithmic bias. Her research aims at quantifying and analyzing the carbon footprint of deep learning models.

Education
Luccioni obtained a bachelor's degree in Linguistics and a master's degree in Cognitive Science, studying language acquisition in virtual environments. In 2016 she got a PhD in Cognitive computing at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she wrote her thesis on the role of Artificial intelligence and Natural language processing in language acquisition.

Career and research
Luccioni started her career at Nuance Communications, before joining Morgan Stanley as the founding member of their Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence. There, she worked on developing new techniques for named-entity recognition and sentiment analysis in financial settings.

In 2019, she joined the Mila research institute to work with Yoshua Bengio, leading "This Climate Does Not Exist", a project that used Generative adversarial network approaches to create images of climate change impacts around the world. In 2020, she was named a National Geographic Explorer.

Since 2021, she has been the climate research lead at Hugging Face, assessing and reporting on the carbon footprint of AI and specifically of transformer models. She also studies the ethical and societal impacts of machine learning models and datasets.

In September 2023, Luccioni was named to MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35” list for contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. The next month, she gave a TED talk during the TEDWomen event in Atlanta on why the world needs to focus on AI’s current negative impacts rather than future existential risks. Her talk has garnered over 1 million views since it was uploaded.

As of 2024, she serves as a board member of Women in Machine Learning, and a member of the OECD AI Expert Group on AI Compute and Climate.