On Tuesday, 7. 7. 2026, 12:30-14:00 in in BA.V11, we are happy to host a guest lecture from June Sallou, Wageningen University, NL on “The Hidden Cost of AI: Toward Energy-Aware Software Engineering”.
Talk abstract
As AI systems software grow increasingly demanding, the environmental footprint of (AI) software has become a systemic challenge for software engineering. Energy consumption is shaped by the decisions engineers make at every stage of development, from algorithm selection and model design to deployment and inference strategies. This presentation examines how software engineering decisions contribute to energy consumption, how to reason about these costs, and what it means in practice to embed sustainability as a first-class concern throughout the development lifecycle.
Biography of our speaker
June Sallou is Assistant Professor in the Information Technology Group at Wageningen University and Research, in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the sustainability of AI-enabled and scientific computing systems, spanning empirical energy measurement, sustainable agentic AI engineering, and scientific software sustainability. She completed her PhD at the University of Rennes at the intersection of software engineering and hydrogeology, and was subsequently a postdoctoral researcher in the Software Engineering Research Group at Delft University of Technology. Her work bridges empirical software engineering methodology and domain science, connecting the sustainability of AI systems to the broader communities of researchers, engineers, and policymakers who depend on them. She serves on the organisation committees of several international conferences and workshops in software engineering and sustainable computing, and acts as reviewer for leading journals in the field.
The environmental footprint of AI will follow us the next years, as the use of AI methods is continuously increasing. This means we will have to take sustainability concerns more actively in our software engineering processes into account. We're looking forward to discuss these topics with the audience!
*This research stay is (partly) funded by the Equal Opportunities team (external link, opens in a new window) of the Faculty of Informatics and Data Science (external link, opens in a new window).