SSP Distinguished Speaker: Timnit Gebru on Community Rooted Research

The
Symbolic Systems Program
presents

The Annual Symbolic Systems Distinguished Speaker Lecture for 2023

Independent Community Rooted Research
Timnit Gebru
Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR)

Wednesday, February 15, 2023
5-6:30 pm

In person event (open to the public):
Building 420, Room 040 (Lower Level)

Co-sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society

ABSTRACT:

The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) was launched on December 2, 2021 by Timnit Gebru as a space for independent, interdisciplinary community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence. The institute recently celebrated its 1 year anniversary. Timnit Gebru will discuss DAIR's research philosophy consisting of the following principles: community, trust and time, knowledge production, redistribution, accountability, interrogating power, and imagination. She will discuss the incentive structures that make it difficult to perform ethical AI research, and give examples of works at DAIR hoping to forge a different path.

BIO:

Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian high school students, free of charge.

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