ISTAS25 Group Photo. Photo credit: Fiona Ulrich. The 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS25) themed “AI Evolution and Revolution” was held last week September 10-12 at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, U.S.A.. ISTAS is the flagship conference of the IEEE’s Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), and offers a multi ‐disciplinary forum for engineers, policy makers, entrepreneurs, philosophers, researchers, social scientists, and technologists to collaborate and discuss the social implications of technology.
Featuring a packed three days of Panel presentations, plenary talks, and paper sessions, this year’s ISTAS conference showcased the growing ways AI is being integrated across professions. Talks, presentations and panels examined how AI could shape healthcare, industry, sustainability and culture while stressing the importance of ethics, governance and safeguards to ensure future safety and stability.
“We’re on the threshold of something big happening and it has tremendous implications for how our society will be in the future.”
“We’re on the threshold of something big happening and it has tremendous implications for how our society will be in the future,” said SSIT President Murty Polavarapu while speaking about what he hopes audience members take away from the conference.
Keynote speaker Mei Lin Fung, Chair of IEEE SSIT’s Sustainability Technical Committee, in a talk entitled “The Role of AI in Achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and IEEE’s Responsibility in It,” compared AI’s dual potential to humanity’s discovery of fire: transformative for nutrition and brain growth, but also destructive through forest fires. She noted that AI carries a similar capacity for benefit and harm. Every time a new technology is discovered or created, it brings about both disruption and innovation, and humans have found ways to adapt and deal with the good and bad aspects for as long as we’ve been a species, Fung said.
Fung urged stronger protections for personal data, drawing a historical parallel to the forced removal of Native Americans from their land following the 1830 Indian Removal Act, during the “Trail of Tears”. Just as people were dispossessed of land, she said, individuals risk losing their digital property – their personal data – unless new laws are developed and enacted to protect rights to personal data from bad actors and “power-hungry” organizations that want it.
“We need new kinds of laws for data rights and digital rights,” she said. “We have not been paying attention – especially “we” at the IEEE and ACM – people who know about data.”
Keynote speaker Mei Lin Fung compared AI’s dual potential to humanity’s discovery of fire: transformative for nutrition and brain growth, but also destructive through forest fires.
Fung added that instead of backing away from the topic, those with knowledge about data need to speak up about rights to it because future generations are depending on them.
In “The Expanding Impact and Network of AI,” Plenary Speaker Bob Friday, chief AI Officer at Juniper Networks, echoed Fung’s sentiments about disruption. From electricity to the internet, he noted, each technological leap has reshaped society. The impact of AI, he said, will likely be no different.
The question AI poses, according to Friday, is whether we’re headed toward a time when the automation of so many jobs fundamentally changes what we do to keep ourselves busy, or “work”. If 70% of work becomes automated, Friday said, what we do as work will shift. He feels strongly that middle-tier jobs such as customer support or ticket taking may be among the first eliminated.
To keep up, “the next generation of computer scientists and software engineers need to learn how to design with non-linear and non-deterministic programing,” Friday said.
He added that large language models (LLMs) already surpass the human brain in artificial neurons and nodes. Whereas humans have around 100 billion neurons, LLMs have around 500 billion to a trillion artificial ones.
“It’s an interesting loop we’re dealing with here,” he said. Adding that these models were created using brain power and now they’re being used for things like further discovering the human brain.
“We need new kinds of laws for data rights and digital rights.”
Dr. Yuan Lou, chief AI officer at Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, in “Impact of AI Models in Biotech and Medical Applications,” also predicted near-term job losses from automation, but encourages maintaining a positive outlook.
“We’re probably going to experience temporary pain of jobs being eliminated or replaced by AI innovation systems, but as long as we become more adaptive to what the technology can offer, we will be able to identify new opportunities,” Lou said.
Lou’s work focuses on AI applications in medicine and how new technological advancements could change the study of disease and development of treatments in medicine. He combines different biomedical data into one unified system and calls the approach EPIC Multi-modal AI (Ethical, Proactive, Industrial, and Collaborative). The approach is designed to analyze data as well as anticipate and guide future discoveries, according to Lou.
Past IEEE president Tom Coughlin used his keynote “Digital Storage and Memory Advances Enable Sustainable and Cost Effective AI,” to highlight how new developments in digital storage and memory products have the potential to reduce energy consumption and lower costs at AI data centers. AI technology requires large quantities of data for training purposes, and data centers end up consuming an abundance of energy and resources.
He discussed how heterogeneous integration – a packaging strategy for combining separately manufactured components, called chiplets, into a single, high-performance device – will be critical in sustainably managing the increased demand for power in data centers due to the training of LLMs.
Coughlin also mentioned that if data centers were to extend their first use of storage devices, and then re-sell them later for continued use, sustainability would improve. Additionally, sanitizing data from storage products instead of melting or incinerating them at data centers would enable these devices to be re-used for a longer life.
In sum, he said, the demand for data storage is exploding and it’s leading to growth in the digital storage and memory products markets, because there’s an increased need to support the architecture that underpins data storage.
“It’s driving development in all aspects of the storage and memory hierarchy,” Coughlin said. “And new considerations such as sustainability topics.”
IEEE plans to continue advancing the way it applies generative AI in its various programs, said Grayson Randall, chair of the IEEE Humanitarian Technologies Board, when he spoke about a new partnership between IEEE and ITU.
According to Randall, both communities will be working together to solve real world crises in participating United Nation counties with the use of generative AI.
A formal announcement about the program will be made some time next month, Randall said.
Kathleen Kramer, President of IEEE, made an appearance on stage at the ISTAS25 conference, presenting “One IEEE and the Power of Partnering to Do More,” and in doing so reminded the audience about how impactful the IEEE organization is. Kramer emphasized that publishing, local meetings, and the formation of technical communities that orchestrate conferences like ISTAS25 are how IEEE sustains its reputation for inspiring innovation.
“It’s really about bringing people together in various ways,” she said.
While on stage, Kramer announced the third, second and first place winners of the Student Program and handed awards out to each team for their exemplary projects in the AI space.
“We’re looking to change the world for good,” Kramer said. “And we’re doing it where technology meets that imperative.”
She also reminded the audience about the powerful reach that IEEE has through its publications and member base, and about the organization’s priority to engage in scientific and educational activities that benefit the field of engineering and the public.
“We’re looking to change the world for good,” Kramer said. “And we’re doing it where technology meets that imperative.”
Kalai Ramea
In “AI in Environmental Monitoring and Climate Change Mitigation,” Kalai Ramea, CTO and co-founder of Planette, described an overcast day in Dorze, Ethiopia, when she sat with her team and a group of village farmers in a grassed enclosure on an Enset plantation. Planette had come to introduce Eddy, its newly developed AI weather app.
Manufactured in the San Francisco Bay area and Pacific Northwest, Eddy was designed to help communities adapt to climate change and mitigate its impacts. Ramea and her team traveled to Dorze to explore whether their product could help farmers protect crops from increasingly extreme and often unanticipated weather events. Unlike similar AI tools, Ramea said, Eddy was designed to predict the forecast up to six months in advance.
As an entrepreneur in the AI space, Ramea said she feels responsible for spreading awareness of tools like Eddy so they can be applied by both individuals and governments for disaster prevention. She recognizes however, that technology must first often be introduced into rural communities in “low-tech” modes like SMS messaging or radio, so that it’s more comprehensible. Rural communities, she added, are especially vulnerable to being left behind in the digital age.
A final panel “Taking Action with AI” with Kristen Hassen and Joseph Frascati focused on the use of AI to improve animal welfare outcomes. Hassen, founder of the organization “AI for Animals” has worked extensively with workers to address issues in the U.S. shelter system using AI tools.
Maureen Vavra served as ISTAS25 Conference Chair, and Ahmed Amer was Technical Program Chair.
ISTAS 2026 will be held in Kerala, India, October 14 – 16, 2026.
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