Timnit Gebru
In plain wordsAn Ethiopian-born American computer scientist who exposed racial and gender bias in AI systems, co-wrote the 'stochastic parrots' paper, and founded an independent AI research institute.
Ethiopian-born American computer scientist, founder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research InstituteDistributed AI Research Institute, prop. n.: Timnit Gebru set up this institute in 2021, a year after her departure from Google, to research the damage AI can do, especially to marginalized communities, without relying on big-tech money. (DAIR, 2021). After a Stanford doctorate under Fei-Fei LiFei-Fei Li, prop. n.: A Chinese-American computer scientist whose ImageNet project, millions of hand-labeled photos, gave deep learning the proving ground that launched its boom; she now champions 'human-centered' AI. that used street-level images to estimate neighborhood demographics, she co-authored with Joy BuolamwiniJoy Buolamwini, prop. n.: A Canadian-American computer scientist and activist whose research showed that face-analysis software works far worse on darker-skinned women, and who founded the Algorithmic Justice League. the Gender ShadesGender Shades, prop. n.: A 2018 study showing that commercial face-analysis software guessed the gender of darker-skinned women far less accurately than that of lighter-skinned men. audit (2018), which found that commercial face-analysis systems misclassified darker-skinned women far more often than lighter-skinned men. She proposed 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) and, with Margaret Mitchell and others, model cardsmodel card, n.: A short document published with an AI model explaining what it is for, how it was trained and tested, how well it works for different groups of people, and its known limits. (2019) to document how data and models are made. She co-founded the organization Black in AI (2017) and co-led Google's Ethical AI team until December 2020, when she left after a dispute over the paper that coined 'stochastic parrotsstochastic parrot, n.: A critical label for AI language systems, likening them to parrots that echo patterns in the text they were trained on, fluently but with no grasp of what the words mean.'; Google said she had resigned, while she said she was fired. With Émile P. Torres she later coined 'TESCREALTESCREAL, abbr.: A critical label for a cluster of related belief systems, including transhumanism, effective altruism and longtermism, that its coiners say drive the push to build AGI and share roots with eugenics.', a critical label for ideologies she associates with the race to build artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive..
Related
- Gender ShadesGender Shades, prop. n.: A 2018 study showing that commercial face-analysis software guessed the gender of darker-skinned women far less accurately than that of lighter-skinned men.
- stochastic parrotstochastic parrot, n.: A critical label for AI language systems, likening them to parrots that echo patterns in the text they were trained on, fluently but with no grasp of what the words mean.
- datasheet 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.
- model cardmodel card, n.: A short document published with an AI model explaining what it is for, how it was trained and tested, how well it works for different groups of people, and its known limits.
- Distributed AI Research InstituteDistributed AI Research Institute, prop. n.: Timnit Gebru set up this institute in 2021, a year after her departure from Google, to research the damage AI can do, especially to marginalized communities, without relying on big-tech money.
- algorithmic biasalgorithmic bias, n.: Unfairness in software that judges or serves people: it consistently produces worse results for some groups, such as women, older people or ethnic minorities, often because it learned from skewed or incomplete records.
- Joy BuolamwiniJoy Buolamwini, prop. n.: A Canadian-American computer scientist and activist whose research showed that face-analysis software works far worse on darker-skinned women, and who founded the Algorithmic Justice League.
Sources
- Buolamwini, J. & Gebru, T. (2018). Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81: 77–91.
- Gebru, T. et al. (2021). Datasheets for Datasets. Communications of the ACM 64(12): 86–92.
- Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Proceedings of FAccT 2021.
Mentioned in
stochastic parrotstochastic parrot, n.: A critical label for AI language systems, likening them to parrots that echo patterns in the text they were trained on, fluently but with no grasp of what the words mean., Emily M. BenderEmily M. Bender, prop. n.: An American linguist who argues that language models only mimic the form of language without understanding it, and who co-coined the phrase 'stochastic parrots'., Gender ShadesGender Shades, prop. n.: A 2018 study showing that commercial face-analysis software guessed the gender of darker-skinned women far less accurately than that of lighter-skinned men., Joy BuolamwiniJoy Buolamwini, prop. n.: A Canadian-American computer scientist and activist whose research showed that face-analysis software works far worse on darker-skinned women, and who founded the Algorithmic Justice League., Distributed AI Research InstituteDistributed AI Research Institute, prop. n.: Timnit Gebru set up this institute in 2021, a year after her departure from Google, to research the damage AI can do, especially to marginalized communities, without relying on big-tech money., Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who proposed 'model cards' for documenting AI systems, co-led Google's Ethical AI team, and is chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face., TESCREALTESCREAL, abbr.: A critical label for a cluster of related belief systems, including transhumanism, effective altruism and longtermism, that its coiners say drive the push to build AGI and share roots with eugenics.