Green AI Quotient: Assessing Greenness of AI-based software and the way forward

As the world takes cognizance of AI's growing role in greenhouse gas(GHG) and carbon emissions, the focus of AI research & development is shifting towards inclusion of energy efficiency as another core metric. Sustainability, a core agenda for most organizations, is also being viewed as a core non-functional requirement in software engineering. A similar effort is being undertaken to extend sustainability principles to AI-based systems with focus on energy efficient training and inference techniques. But an important question arises, does there even exist any metrics or methods which can quantify adoption of "green" practices in the life cycle of AI-based systems? There is a huge gap which exists between the growing research corpus related to sustainable practices in AI research and its adoption at an industry scale. The goal of this work is to introduce a methodology and novel metric for assessing "greenness" of any AI-based system and its development process, based on energy efficient AI research and practices. The novel metric, termed as Green AI Quotient, would be a key step towards AI practitioner's Green AI journey. Empirical validation of our approach suggest that Green AI Quotient is able to encourage adoption and raise awareness regarding sustainable practices in AI lifecycle.