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Timnit Gebru

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Timnit Gebru
Gebru in 2018
Gebru in 2018
Born1982 or 1983 (age 40–41)[1]
Ethiopia [1]
Alma materStanford University
Known forAlgorithmic bias
Scientific career
InstitutionsMicrosoft Research
Google
Apple

Timnit Gebru (born 1982/1983)[1] is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence.

In December 2020, her employment with Google as technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team ended after higher Google managers asked her to either withdraw an as-yet-unpublished paper, or remove the names of all the Google employees from that paper (including hers).[1] She refused, demanding to know the names and reasons of everyone who made that decision, and threatened to resign if not provided with that information.[2] Google did not meet her request and her employment was immediately terminated. Google stated that the paper in question, titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?", ignored recent research which showed methods of mitigating the bias in those systems.[3][13]

Early life and education

Gebru was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.[14] Her father died when she was five years old and she was raised by her mother.[15] Both her parents are from Eritrea. As an Eritrean, she faced a possible forced deportation during the Ethiopian-Eritrean War and was forced to flee Ethiopia at age 15. She eventually received political asylum in the United States.[16]

After completing high school in Massachusetts, she was accepted to study at Stanford University.[14] There she earned her Bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering.[17] Gebru worked at Apple Inc., developing signal processing algorithms for the first iPad.[18] Gebru earned her doctorate under the supervision of Fei-Fei Li at Stanford University in 2017. She used data mining of publicly available images.[19] She was interested in the amount of money spent by governmental and non-governmental organisations trying to collect information about communities.[20] To investigate alternatives, Gebru combined deep learning with Google Street View to estimate the demographics of United States neighbourhoods, showing that socioeconomic attributes such as voting patterns, income, race and education can be inferred from observations of cars.[17] If the number of pickup trucks outnumbers the number of sedans, the community are more likely to vote for the Republican party.[21] They analysed over 15 million images from the 200 most populated US cities.[22] The work was extensively covered in the media, being picked up by BBC News, Newsweek, The Economist, and The New York Times.[23][24][25]

Gebru presented her research at the 2017 LDV Capital Vision Summit competition, where computer vision scientists present their work to members of industry and venture capitalists.[26] Gebru won the competition, starting a series of collaborations with other entrepreneurs and investors.[26] Both during her PhD program in 2016 and in 2018, Gebru returned to Ethiopia with Jelani Nelson's programming campaign AddisCoder.[27][28] After receiving her PhD, Gebru joined Microsoft as a postdoctoral researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI (FATE) lab.[22][29]

Career and research

Gebru discussing her findings that one can predict, with some reliability, the way an American will vote from the type of vehicle they drive.

Gebru worked at Google on the ethics of artificial intelligence. She studied the implications of artificial intelligence, looking to improve the ability of technology to do social good.[30] She collaborated with the MIT research group Gender Shades.[31] Gebru worked with Joy Buolamwini to investigate facial recognition software; finding that black women were 35% less likely to be recognised than white men.[32] When Gebru attended an artificial intelligence conference in 2016, she noticed that she was the only black woman out of 8,500 delegates.[33] Together with her colleague Rediet Abebe, Gebru founded Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence.

Gebru also worked on Microsoft's Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in the AI team. In 2017, Gebru spoke on the Fairness and Transparency conference, where MIT Technology Review interviewed her about biases that exist in AI systems and how adding diversity in AI teams can fix that issue. In her interview with Jackie Snow, Snow asked Gebru, "How does the lack of diversity distort artificial intelligence and specifically computer vision?" and Gebru pointed out that there are biases that exist in the software developers.[34] Gebru and other artificial intelligence researchers signed a letter that reflected the systemic issues that reside in Amazon's facial recognition software. A study that was conducted by MIT researchers shows that Amazon's facial recognition system had more trouble identifying darker-skinned females than any other technology company's facial recognition software.[35] In a New York Times interview, Gebru has further expressed that she believes facial recognition is too dangerous to be used for law enforcement and security purposes right now.[36]

Exit from Google

Gebru ceased working for Google in December 2020. The circumstances of her departure are disputed. Gebru and some of her co-workers claimed that she had been fired from Google.[1][37] Google executives Jeff Dean and Megan Kacholia claimed that she offered to resign and that her resignation was subsequently accepted by Google.[8][38][39] She stated that she never offered to resign, only threatened to resign.[2]

Gebru had co-authored a paper on the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people.[12] In a mail sent to an internal collaboration list, Gebru describes how she was summoned to a meeting at short notice where she was asked to withdraw the paper, and says that her subsequent inquiries into the identities of the reviewers as well as how or why the decision had been taken were ignored.[40] Gebru asked for certain conditions to be met in order to prevent her resignation, but Google's AI team was unwilling to meet those conditions and accepted her resignation on the same day.[41] Jeff Dean, Google's head of AI research, replied with an email saying that they took the decision because the paper ignored too much relevant recent research on ways to mitigate some of the problems described in it, about environmental impact and bias of these models.[40]

Following the controversy, Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued an apology without admitting wrongdoing.[42] Over 1200 Google employees and 1500 researchers signed a letter condemning Gebru's alleged firing.[43]

On 16 December 2020, Google's Ethical AI research team demanded that Vice President Megan Kacholia be removed from the team's management chain.[44] Kacholia had allegedly fired Dr. Gebru without notifying Gebru's direct manager Dr. Samy Bengio first.[45] Google's Ethical AI team also demanded Megan Kacholia and Google's chief of AI, Jeff Dean, apologize for how Dr. Gebru was treated.[46]

Nine members of Congress sent a letter to Google asking it to clarify the circumstances around Timnit Gebru's exit.[47]

Awards

Gebru, Joy Buolamwini, and Inioluwa Raji won VentureBeat's 2019 AI Innovations Award in the category AI for Good for their research highlighting the significant problem of algorithmic bias in facial recognition.[48][49]

Selected publications

  • Gebru, Timnit; Krause, Jonathan; Wang, Yilun; Chen, Duyun; Deng, Jia; Aiden, Erez Lieberman; Fei-Fei, Li (12 December 2017). "Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods across the United States". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114 (50): 13108–13113. doi:10.1073/pnas.1700035114. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 5740675. PMID 29183967.
  • Buolamwini, Joy; Gebru, Timnit (2018). "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification". Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. 81: 1–15. ISSN 1938-7288.
  • Gebru, Timnit (9 July 2020). "Race and Gender". In Dubber, Markus D.; Pasquale, Frank; Das, Sunit (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI. Oxford University Press. pp. 251–269. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190067397.013.16. ISBN 978-0-19-006739-7.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Metz, Cade; Wakabayashi, Daisuke (3 December 2020). "Google Researcher Says She Was Fired Over Paper Highlighting Bias in A.I." The New York Times. Archived from the original on 11 December 2020. Retrieved 12 December 2020. After she and the other researchers submitted the paper to an academic conference, Dr. Gebru said, a Google manager demanded that she either retract the paper from the conference or remove her name and the names of the other Google employees. She refused to do so without further discussion and, in the email sent Tuesday evening, said she would resign after an appropriate amount of time if the company could not explain why it wanted her to retract the paper and answer other concerns. The company responded to her email, she said, by saying it could not meet her demands and that her resignation was accepted immediately. Her access to company email and other services was immediately revoked. In his note to employees, Mr. Dean said Google respected "her decision to resign." Mr. Dean also said that the paper did not acknowledge recent research showing ways of mitigating bias in such systems.
  2. ^ a b Allyn, Bobby (17 December 2020). "Ousted Black Google Researcher: 'They Wanted To Have My Presence, But Not Me Exactly'". NPR. Archived from the original on 18 December 2020. Retrieved 19 December 2020. After Google demanded that Gebru retract the paper for not meeting the company's bar for publication, Gebru asked that the process be explained to her, including a list of everyone who was part of the decision. If Google refused, Gebru said she would talk to her manager about "a last date." Google took that to mean Gebru offered to resign, and Google leadership say they accepted, but Gebru herself said no such offer was ever extended, only threatened.
  3. ^ Fried, Ina. "Google CEO pledges to investigate exit of top AI ethicist". Axios. Archived from the original on 10 December 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
  4. ^ Hao, Karen (4 December 2020). "We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here's what it says". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 25 December 2020. Retrieved 5 December 2020.
  5. ^ "Top AI ethics researcher says Google fired her; company denies it". Reuters. Archived from the original on 5 December 2020. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
  6. ^ Ghaffary, Shirin (4 December 2020). "The controversy behind a star Google AI researcher's departure". Vox. Archived from the original on 6 December 2020. Retrieved 6 December 2020.
  7. ^ "Timnit Gebru: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher". BBC. Archived from the original on 4 December 2020. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
  8. ^ a b "Google fires prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru". The Verge. Archived from the original on 3 December 2020. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
  9. ^ "Google's co-lead of Ethical AI team says she was fired for sending an email". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 4 December 2020. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
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  12. ^ a b "Timnit Gebru: Google staff rally behind fired AI researcher". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 25 December 2020. Retrieved 5 December 2020.
  13. ^ On the name of the paper;[4] On it still being planned for publication;[5] Higher managers;[6] Dispute escalating[7][8][9][10][11][12][excessive citations]
  14. ^ a b Lahde, Lisa. "AI Innovators: How One Woman Followed Her Passion and Brought Diversity to AI". Forbes. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  15. ^ Chisling, Ava (24 July 2017). "Excuse me, sir, but where are all the women?". ROSS Intelligence. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  16. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 7 December 2020. Retrieved 14 December 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  17. ^ a b AI, People In (16 September 2017). "Timnit Gebru honored as an Alicorn of Artificial Intelligence by People in AI". Selfpreneur. Archived from the original on 5 December 2020. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  18. ^ "Timnit Gebru". Databricks. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  19. ^ "Understanding the Limits of AI: When Algorithms Fail". MIT Tech Review. Archived from the original on 5 December 2020. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  20. ^ Capital, L. D. V. (1 August 2017), Timnit Gebru - 2017 Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenge Finalist Presentations, archived from the original on 5 December 2020, retrieved 9 January 2019
  21. ^ Fei-Fei, Li; Aiden, Erez Lieberman; Deng, Jia; Chen, Duyun; Wang, Yilun; Krause, Jonathan; Gebru, Timnit (12 December 2017). "Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods across the United States". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 114 (50): 13108–13113. doi:10.1073/pnas.1700035114. ISSN 1091-6490. PMC 5740675. PMID 29183967.
  22. ^ a b "Timnit Gebru". Design Better. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  23. ^ Lufkin, Bryan (6 January 2018). "What Google Street View tells us about income". Worklife. BBC. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  24. ^ "A machine-learning census of America's cities". The Economist. 2 March 2017. ISSN 0013-0613. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  25. ^ Lohr, Steve (31 December 2017). "How Do You Vote? 50 Million Google Images Give a Clue". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  26. ^ a b "Timnit Gebru Wins 2017 ECVC: Leveraging Computer Vision to Predict Race, Education and Income via Google Streetview Images". LDV Capital. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  27. ^ Magazine, Tadias. "Timnit Gebru: Among Incredible Women Advancing A.I. Research at Tadias Magazine". Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  28. ^ "History | AddisCoder". www.addiscoder.com. Archived from the original on 21 March 2018. Retrieved 10 January 2019.
  29. ^ "Timnit Gebru". World Science Festival. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  30. ^ University, Office of Web Communications, Cornell. "Digital Life Seminar | Timnit Gebru". Cornell. Archived from the original on 10 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  31. ^ "Team". MIT Media Lab. Archived from the original on 25 July 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  32. ^ Lohr, Steve (9 February 2018). "Facial Recognition Is Accurate, if You're a White Guy". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 9 January 2019. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  33. ^ Birhaner, De (26 May 2017). "Ethiopian Ms. Timnit Gebru Fights Algorithmic Bias And Homogenous Thinking in A.I." De Birhan. Archived from the original on 23 October 2018. Retrieved 9 January 2019.
  34. ^ Mitchell, Margaret; Wu, Simone; Zaldivar, Andrew; Barnes, Parker; Vasserman, Lucy; Hutchinson, Ben; Spitzer, Elena; Raji, Inioluwa Deborah; Gebru, Timnit (2019). "Model Cards for Model Reporting". Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency - FAT* '19. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press: 220–229. arXiv:1810.03993. doi:10.1145/3287560.3287596. ISBN 978-1-4503-6125-5. S2CID 52946140.
  35. ^ Mitchell, Andrea (April 2019). "A.I. Experts Question Amazons Facial-Recognition Technology". ICT Monitor Worldwide; Amman. Archived from the original on 26 November 2019.
  36. ^ Ovide, Shira (9 June 2020). "A Case for Banning Facial Recognition". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 17 July 2020. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
  37. ^ Ghaffary, Shirin (4 December 2020). "The controversy behind a star Google AI researcher's departure". Vox. Archived from the original on 6 December 2020. Retrieved 6 December 2020.
  38. ^ Jeff Dean [@JeffDean] (4 December 2020). "I understand the concern over Timnit's resignation from Google. She's done a great deal to move the field forward with her research. I wanted to share the email I sent to Google Research and some thoughts on our research process" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  39. ^ "Google workers mobilize against firing of top Black female executive". NBC News. Archived from the original on 5 December 2020. Retrieved 5 December 2020.
  40. ^ a b Newton, Casey. "The withering email that got an ethical AI researcher fired at Google". www.platformer.news. Archived from the original on 10 December 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
  41. ^ Schiffer, Zoe. "Timnit Gebru's team at Google is going public with their side of the story". theverge.com. Archived from the original on 17 December 2020. Retrieved 18 December 2020.
  42. ^ Wakabayashi, Daisuke (9 December 2020). "Google Chief Apologizes for A.I. Researcher's Dismissal". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 10 December 2020. Retrieved 10 December 2020.
  43. ^ Wong, Julia Carrie (4 December 2020). "More than 1,200 Google workers condemn firing of AI scientist Timnit Gebru". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 15 December 2020. Retrieved 15 December 2020.
  44. ^ Metz, Rachel (17 December 2020). "Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO". CNN. Archived from the original on 17 December 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
  45. ^ Dastin, Jeffrey; Dave, Paresh (17 December 2020). "Google staff demand exec step aside after ethicist's firing - document". Reuters. Archived from the original on 17 December 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
  46. ^ Eidelson, Josh; Bergen, Mark (17 December 2020). "Google AI Researchers Lay Out Demands, Escalating Internal Fight". Bloomberg. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
  47. ^ Hao, Karen (17 December 2020). "Congress wants answers from Google about Timnit Gebru's firing". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 25 December 2020. Retrieved 17 December 2020.
  48. ^ "AI innovation winners announced in San Francisco". Innovation Matrix. 12 July 2019. Archived from the original on 12 July 2020. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
  49. ^ Burt, Chris (18 July 2019). "Buolamwini, Gebru and Raji win AI Innovation Award for research into biometric bias". Biometric Update. Archived from the original on 12 July 2020. Retrieved 12 July 2020.
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