Carlo Lipizzi and Stevens Faculty Awarded First Place in Siemens Tech for Sustainability Campaign
Green-Connect, an artificial intelligence (AI) project created in collaboration between Stevens faculty members including Carlo Lipizzi of the School of Systems & Enterprises (SSE), was awarded first place in the Siemens Tech for Sustainability Campaign within the Siemens Financial Services (SFS) category.
The Siemens Tech for Sustainability Campaign is a global initiative challenging researchers to leverage technology to solve real-world sustainability problems. SFS prompted researchers to incentivize businesses to conduct carbon-efficient operations through a transparent and sustainable lens.
How Green-Connect Can Benefit Society
Based on a system developed by Lipizzi, the Green-Connect prototype uses AI, machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for data acquisition and manipulation to identify sustainability projects across industries.
“Climate change and its unprecedented consequences create an accelerated need for sustainable solutions for all businesses,” said Lipizzi. “Stevens looks to be a pioneer in the development of state-of-the-art technologies that promote sustainable industry and help humanity.”
SFS funds sustainability projects each year, manually reviewing a significant number of written resources and documents to identify potential projects and assess validity. This process is time-consuming and increases the risk of missing opportunities and mismatches. Green-Connect addresses this issue using AI and machine learning science to transform the assessment into an automated process that enables targeted harvesting of projects from a large pool of business prospects and across multiple sustainability domains. Advantages include more effective communication of the value-added benefits of a sustainability project investment to prospective clients and competitive project financing offerings by including other funding sources such as government grants and subsidies.
Lipizzi was joined by a multidisciplinary team of Stevens researchers including George Korfiatis and Mohammad Ilbeigi from the School of Engineering and Science, Ph.D. in civil engineering student Azita Morteza, and M.Eng. in engineering management student Hojat Behrooz. First place prizes awarded to the Green-Connect team included a grant, access to the SFS Discovery Lab, and working/internship opportunities for student researchers.
“Our team is composed of researchers with rich and diverse experience, and our team model is using state-of-the-art science for practical solutions to help humanity,” said George Korfiatis at the Tech for Sustainability award ceremony. “But the most important attributes of the team is the contagious enthusiasm that impairs and their yielding desire to do good for society. We are thankful for the opportunity to participate and we're thrilled to place first in this category.”
View the recording of the Tech for Sustainability Final Ceremony and jump to 1:10:40 on the video timeline to watch Lipizzi and Korfiatis present on Green-Connect.
