Women in AI: Marissa Hummon believes that AI will play a key role in making the power grid more environmentally friendly.

As a part of TechCrunch's ongoing Women in AI series, which has brought AI-focused women academics and others their much-deserved — and long-overdue — time in the spotlight
Women in AI: Marissa Hummon believes that AI will play a key role in making the power grid more environmentally friendly.

As a part of TechCrunch's ongoing Women in AI series, which has brought AI-focused women academics and others their much-deserved — and long-overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch spoke with Marissa Hummon, chief technology officer at energy company Utilidata, where she is working to make the electric grid more sustainable.

The work I'm doing at Utilidata is pushing against the status quo of the utility industry, Hummon said in an interview with TechCrunch, adding that AI is poised to make the utility sector more efficient. It will give utilities the tools they need to operate a clean, modern, and reliable grid that will better serve the people and businesses connected to it.

Hummon began her career at the National Renewable Energy Lab, where she researched how to move the energy industry away from carbon-intensive solutions and towards more clean sources. She remembered having to take a new approach with modeling because "some physics equations are unsolvable using traditional analytic methods."

"Instead we needed to use numerical methods and machine learning," she said. This was back in 2010.

Advice to women
Hummon worked her way up, through stints at the energy company Tendril and then as CTO at Utilidata, a job she has held since 2018. She received her PhD in applied physics from Harvard and said that as she made the transition from grad school into the engineering field, she saw the number of women in the field sharply decline. "I have often felt the pressure of being held to a different standard on the job compared to my male counterparts," she said. Hummon said now as a leader, she tries to lead by example and create opportunities for women to lead and be recognized. But at the same time, she said, men need to be responsible for creating space for more women to enter and stay in the field.

The change we need is not only practice but systemic and at large," she said. "It begins with hiring and recruitment, continues through mentoring and coaching, and finally to fair and equitable recognition and promotion all within the structure of a safe and inclusive workplace.

Her counseling advice to women coming into the AI field is that "it's always remembered that being a woman can give you an advantage. It's given you a perspective that is different from your male peers and breakthroughs in technology always come from unique perspectives.".

She cautions that one look for opportunities with companies that have already shown commitment to diversity and to company leaders who have pointed out the efforts they make to advance women and minorities. "Judge a potential employer by the way they show up in the interview process, not by the statements or the reports they put on their website."
Building ethical AI

Users should understand that AI is not something that can be used as a silver bullet, but rather expert assistant to enhance operations, improve effectiveness, help support, Hummon said. "But recognizing its limitations and ensuring there are proper checkpoints is key," she said.

She emphasized that knowing what the model was trained and developed from provides insight into what biases are embedded in the model. "Knowing these things helps work with language models to do data analysis and evaluate whether proposed solutions are worth pursuing, but AI is only as good as the data and information it was trained on," she said.

She also shared some insights into the whole area of safe AI building, stating that Utilidata decided early on to keep all its data local. "Approaching model building using distributed AI computing reduces the amount and frequency of information being transmitted to the cloud and therefore reduces the chances of a security or privacy breach."

To investors, she said — as did all the other experts we interviewed — they have to evaluate how a company intends to use AI, especially in terms of how it applies in every industry. "The investment in responsible AI should be commensurate with the risk and complexity of any given company, not an across-the-board standard."

 

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2024-10-21 18:17:22