In October 2021, Cynthia Rudin was announced as the winner of the AAAI Squirrel AI award. This award recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways. Cynthia was formally presented with the prize during an award ceremony at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, following which she delivered an invited talk. Cynthia began her talk, and set the scene for her research in interpretable AI, with the story of a project she carried out in New York City, where the goal was to maintain the power grid using machine learning. Some parts of the grid infrastructure in the city are as old as 140 years, and this inevitably leads to failures in parts of the system.

Everything working and connected – in perfect symbiosis." I help our customers and partners with their digital journey, which involves innovation, business growth, and digital transformation. In this blog series of 6 posts, I look at the universal framework and the "building blocks" of smart cities in several contexts, trying to answer and interpret some of the questions that arise when thinking of digital transformation and smart city construction. In this third post, I touch upon the intelligent city ecosystem and industry convergence. We can think of "smart" at more of a technological level – sensor, actuators, data collection, and a reactive response; for example, a smart street light that switches on and off when it senses a pedestrian.

This paper studies a new renewable energy investment model through crowdfunding, which is motivated by emerging community solar farms. In this paper we develop a sequential game theory model to capture the interactions among crowdfunders, the solar farm owner, and an electricity company who purchases renewable energy generated by the solar farm in a multi-period framework. By characterizing a unique subgame-perfect equilibrium, andcomparing it with a benchmark model without crowdfunding, we find that under crowdfunding although the farm owner reduces its investment level, the overall green energy investment level is increased due to the contribution of crowdfunders. We also find that crowdfunding can increase the penetration of green energy in consumption and thus reduce the energy procurement cost of the electricity company. Finally, the numerical results based on real data indicates crowdfunding is a simple but effective way to boost green generation.