Kate Crawford

Australian scholar who examines the social, political and material costs of AI; she is a research professor at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. In 2017 she co-founded, with Meredith Whittaker, the AI Now InstituteAI Now Institute, prop. n.: A research and advocacy group that examines who is harmed by AI and argues that the deeper problem is the power of a few big technology companies, which it wants curbed by law. at New York University, whose reports helped establish algorithmic accountabilityalgorithmic accountability, n.: The idea that the people and organizations behind automated decision systems must be able to explain and justify those systems' effects, answer for the harm they cause, and fix it. and algorithmic impact assessmentsalgorithmic impact assessment, n.: A structured review, done before and during the use of an automated system, of whom it could affect and how — such as unfair treatment or privacy harms — and what will be done about it. as policy tools. With the artist Trevor Paglen she examined the categories used to label people in training data ('Excavating AI', 2019), work whose viral ImageNet Roulette app preceded the removal of many person categories from ImageNetImageNet, prop. n.: A huge collection of more than 14 million labeled photos, sorted into object categories, whose yearly recognition contest from 2010 to 2017 sparked the deep learning boom.; with Vladan Joler she mapped the labor, data and mineral extraction behind a voice assistant ('Anatomy of an AI System', 2018). Her book 'Atlas of AI' (2021) argues that AI is a material and political infrastructure that concentrates power, not a disembodied intelligence. She co-authored datasheets for datasetsdatasheet for datasets, n.: A standard document that travels with a dataset, describing why it was made, what is in it, how it was collected and labeled, and what it should and should not be used for. (2018).