Invited Talk (Posner Lecture)

Powering the next 100 years

John Platt

2017 Invited Talk (Posner Lecture)

[ Video]

Abstract

My goal is to let everyone on Earth be able to use the same amount of energy per year as the average U.S. citizen does today. To reach this goal by 2100 will require 0.2 Yottajoules: 0.2 x 10^24 Joules of energy, which is an astounding amount of energy.

How can human civilization obtain this much energy without flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide? To answer this question, I'll first dive into the economics of electricity, in order to understand the limits of current zero-carbon technologies. These limits cause us to investigate zero-carbon technologies that are still being developed, such as fusion energy. For fusion, I'll show why it's been a tough problem for almost 70 years, and why there may be a solution in the near future. I'll also explain how we've been using machine learning and optimization to accelerate fusion research.

Speaker

John Platt

John Platt is best known for his work in machine learning: the SMO algorithm for support vector machines and calibrating the output of models. He was an early adopter of convolutional neural networks in the 1990s. However, John has worked in many different fields: data systems, computational geometry, object recognition, media UIs, analog computation, handwriting recognition, and applied math. He has discovered two asteroids, and won a Technical Academy Award in 2006 for his work in computer graphics. John currently leads the Applied Science branch of Google Research, which works at the intersection between computer science and physical or biological science.

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