Valerie Karplus Presents LEO Research and Facilitates Hackathon at Reuters Events, Future of Heavy Industries USA 2025

LEO Principal Investigator Valerie Karplus presented research and facilitated a hackathon at this year's Future of Heavy Industries USA 2025, hosted by Reuters Events in Pittsburgh.

Her talk, "Using Machine Learning to Model Future Pathways," showcased how CMU’s decarbonization research brings together social science and materials science and engineering to develop new approaches and policy-relevant analysis and to communicate insights to a variety of stakeholder communities. She discussed how CMU has developed open-source tools such as the Decarbonizing Steelmaking Techno-Economic EvaLuation Tool (decarbSTEEL) that can help decision-makers evaluate cost-effectiveness and CO₂ emissions impacts of decarbonization pathways under varying market conditions and policy scenarios. She also described the potential and limits of machine learning to improve the ability of models to represent existing production, providing a basis to evaluate future pathways using decarbSTEEL or other approaches.

Dr. Karplus's interactive Hackathon, "Cost efficiency to low-carbon," gave participants an opportunity to explore the intersection of cost savings and CO₂ emissions reduction, starting with each goal as the primary objective and considering the overlap in solutions uncovered. In four teams, the group evaluated opportunities for companies and industry to lower cost and improve sustainability and low carbon performance and discovered where trade-off’s arise, closing with a vibrant discussion of market and policy enablers and payoff trajectories.

LinkedIn posts about the events can be found here and here.