Timnit Gebru biography: 13 things about Eritrean-Ethiopian AI researcher
BY CONAN ALTATIS
https://conandaily.com/2020/12/05/timni ... esearcher/
DECEMBER 5, 2020
Timnit Gebru
Timnit Gebru is a Ethiopian computer scientist and a researcher on ethics and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). She is of Eritrean descent.
Having worked on racial bias in technology for years, Gebru criticized systems that fail to recognize African-American faces. While on vacation during the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, she was terminated from her position as staff research scientist and co-lead of ethical AI team at Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States.
Gebru is an alumna of Stanford University in Stanford, California. Here are 13 more things about her:
1. She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on May 13, 1983. She is the youngest among three daughters.
2. Her two older sisters are electrical engineers like their father, who died in 1988.
3. Both of her parents are from Eritrea, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. She traveled to Ireland to escape potential forced deportation to Eritrea by the Ethiopian government.
4. In 1999, she moved from Ethiopia to the U.S. Her two older sisters have been living in the U.S. and their mother moved there months before she did.
5. She completed her high school education in Massachusetts, USA.
6. From June 2004 to September 2004, she served as an audio hardware intern at Apple in Cupertino, California.
7. She worked for Apple as an audio systems engineer from July 2005 to September 2007 and as an audio software and hardware engineer from June 2007 to August 2011.
8. In 2008, she earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She served as a graduate research assistant there from September 2010 to June 2011. From the same university, she earned her masters degree in electrical engineering in 2010 and her PhD in electrical engineering in 2015. While she was still a PhD student, she co-founded Black in AI with Rediet Abebe.
9. In September 2011, she co-founded MotionThink, which is based in Palo Alto, California.
10. From June 2012 to August 2012, she attended Hacker School in New York, New York, USA. She honed her programming skills by working on a variety of open source projects in Objective C, python, C++, Ruby on Rails and Javascript.
11. In 2016, she attended an AI research conference attended by an estimated 8,500 people. She noticed that out of the attendees, only six were African-American and among them, she was the only female.
12. In 2018, she finished her post-doctoral research in the Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics (FATE) in AI group at Microsoft Research in New York City. In the same year, she and Joy Buolamwini co-authored a paper titled “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.” http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolam ... ini18a.pdf
13. She was one of the speakers at the inaugural Fast Company Innovation Festival, https://events.fastcompany.com/moxieclon9-29 which was held from October 5-9, 2020.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Timnit Gebru’s actual paper may explain why Google ejected her
It questioned language models similar to the ones used in Google’s Search
By Kim Lyons
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/5/2215 ... -search-ai
Dec 5, 2020
Photo by Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch
A paper co-authored by former Google AI ethicist Timnit Gebru raised some potentially thorny questions for Google about whether AI language models may be too big, and whether tech companies are doing enough to reduce potential risks, according to MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/1 ... nit-gebru/ The paper also questioned the environmental costs and inherent biases in large language models.
Google’s AI team created such a language model— BERT— in 2018, https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/11/open- ... t-pre.html and it was so successful that the company incorporated BERT into its search engine. https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/25/209 ... t-langauge Search is a highly lucrative segment of Google’s business; in the third quarter of this year alone, it brought in revenue of $26.3 billion.
CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call with investors https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/29/215 ... oud-search in October.This year, including this quarter, showed how valuable Google’s founding product — search — has been to people,
Gebru and her team submitted their paper, titled
On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
for a research conference.
She said in a series of tweets https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/29/215 ... oud-search on Wednesday that following an internal review, she was asked to retract the paper or remove Google employees’ names from it. She says she asked Google for conditions for taking her name off the paper, and if they couldn’t meet the conditions they could
Gebru says she then received an email from Google informing her they werework on a last date.
The head of Google AI, Jeff Dean, wrote in an email to employees https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f2k ... rWjK0/edit that the paperaccepting her resignation effective immediately.
He wrote that one of Gebru’s conditions for continuing to work at Google was for the company to tell her who had reviewed the paper and their specific feedback, which it declined to do.didn’t meet our bar for publication.
Dean wrote.Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google,
GEBRU IS KNOWN FOR HER WORK ON ALGORITHMIC BIAS, ESPECIALLY IN FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY
In his letter, Dean wrote that the paper
a claim that the paper’s co-author Emily M. Bender, a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Washington, disputed.ignored too much relevant research,
Bender told MIT Technology Review that the paper, which had six collaborators, was
noting it had a citation list of 128 references.the sort of work that no individual or even pair of authors can pull off,
Gebru is known for her work on algorithmic bias, especially in facial recognition technology. In 2018, she co-authored a paper with Joy Buolamwini that showed error rates for identifying darker-skinned people were much higher https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/10/2128 ... acial-bias than error rates for identifying lighter-skinned people, since the datasets used to train algorithms were overwhelmingly white.
Gebru told Wired in an interview https://www.wired.com/story/prominent-a ... fired-her/ published Thursday that she felt she was being censored.
she said.You’re not going to have papers that make the company happy all the time and don’t point out problems,
Since news of her termination became public, thousands of supporters, including more than 1,500 Google employees have signed a letter of protest.That’s antithetical to what it means to be that kind of researcher.
reads the petition, titled Standing with Dr. Timnit Gebru. https://googlewalkout.medium.com/standi ... adc300d382We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Dr. Timnit Gebru, who was terminated from her position as Staff Research Scientist and Co-Lead of Ethical Artificial Intelligence (AI) team at Google, following unprecedented research censorship,
The petitioners are demanding that Dean and othersWe call on Google Research to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to unequivocally commit to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Google’s AI Principles.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.who were involved with the decision to censor Dr. Gebru’s paper meet with the Ethical AI team to explain the process by which the paper was unilaterally rejected by leadership.
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Timnit Gebru: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher
Published 2 days ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55187611
Google AI Research Scientist Timnit Gebru speaks onstage at a 2018 conference GETTY IMAGES
Hundreds of Google staff have signed a letter backing a leading AI ethics researcher who was sacked by Google.
Timnit Gebru says she was fired after sending an internal email that accused Google of
Hundreds of colleagues have signed a letter accusing the search giant of racism and censorship, while Twitter users have rallied around Dr Gebru using the hashtag #BelieveBlackWomen.silencing marginalised voices.
Google disputes her version of events.
Dr Gebru is a well-respected researcher in the field of ethics and the use of artificial intelligence.
She is well-known for her work on racial bias in technology such as facial recognition, and has criticised systems that fail to recognise black faces.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
Her co-author on one of those well-known papers, Joy Buolamwini, said Dr Gebru
from Google.deserved more
she said.Ousting Timnit for having the audacity to demand research integrity severely undermines Google's credibility for supporting rigorous research on AI ethics and algorithmic auditing,
What happened?We owe her a debt of gratitude for advancing not just the field of artificial intelligence, but for advancing equality with humility and grace.
Dr Gebru alleges that as she was preparing to go on leave, she was called to a meeting about a research paper she had co-written.
She said she was ordered to retract the research paper and that Google was not prepared to engage in a discussion about the matter.
Following the meeting, she sent an email to an internal group called
Brain Women and Allies,
criticising the decision.
A copy of the email has been published by Platformer. https://www.platformer.news/p/the-withe ... an-ethical
she said in the email.You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity... is acknowledged or valued in this company,
Stop writing your documents because it doesn't make a difference.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
Dr Gebru had emailed her management laying out some key conditions for removing her name from the paper, and if they were not met, she would
for her employment.work on a last date
According to Dr Gebru, Google replied:
Dr Gebru denied she had resigned, tweeting that she had been fired by Jeff Dean, a senior manager at Google dealing with AI Research.We respect your decision to leave Google... and we are accepting your resignation.
However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behaviour that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
she said.I guess [management] decided for me,
The research paper remains unpublished, but MIT Technology Review has summarised its contents, saying it focused on the risks of training AI by drawing on huge archives of text data. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/1 ... nit-gebru/
What has the reaction been?
Since her dismissal, the open letter of support has attracted nearly 2,000 signatories, both from within Google and the wider industry.
News of her dismissal came on the same day that a US labour agency accused Google https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55173063 of illegally firing staff for their involvement in union activity.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
Google staff who worked with Dr Gebru have applauded her academic contributions and her work as a manager.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.
tweeted Deb Raji, an AI researcher.I cannot count the number of times Timnit Gebru has encouraged us, spoken out for us, defended us and stuck her neck out for us,
What does Google say?She has made real sacrifices for the Black community. Now it's time to stand with her!
In an email, Mr Dean said there had been
about the firing.a lot of speculation and misunderstanding
He alleged that Dr Gebru's paper was submitted a day before its deadline, which was not enough time for Google's review process. He also said the paper ignored much relevant research.
Mr Dean wrote.Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who [we] had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback.
Timnit wrote that if we didn't meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date. We accept and respect her decision to resign from Google,
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More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru.... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ity-ethics
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We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says... https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/1 ... nit-gebru/
