Timnit Gebru facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Timnit Gebru
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Gebru in 2018
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| Born | 1982/1983 (age 41–42) Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
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| Alma mater | Stanford University |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
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| Doctoral advisor | Fei-Fei Li |
Timnit Gebru (born 1982/1983) is a famous computer scientist. She is known for her work on artificial intelligence (AI), which is the science of making smart computer programs. She studies how to make AI fair for everyone, a field known as algorithmic bias.
Gebru is a co-founder of Black in AI, a group that supports Black people working in artificial intelligence. She also started her own research center called the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).
In 2020, Gebru left her job at Google, where she was a leader on the Ethical AI team. This caused a lot of public discussion. She had co-written a research paper about the risks of very large AI language programs. Google's leaders asked her to take back the paper, but she refused. Google then ended her employment. Gebru said she did not quit and was fired.
Gebru is seen as an expert on making AI ethical and fair. She has received many awards. Fortune magazine named her one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. In 2022, Time magazine called her one of the most influential people in the world.
Contents
Early Life and Schooling
Gebru grew up in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Her father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was an economist. Both of her parents were from Eritrea. When Gebru was 15, she had to leave Ethiopia because of the Eritrean–Ethiopian War.
She moved to the United States and received political asylum. Gebru said this was a very difficult experience. She finished high school in Massachusetts, where she was a top student.
An experience with the police made her want to focus on fairness in technology. She reported that a friend of hers was assaulted, but the police arrested her friend instead. Gebru called this a key moment that showed her how systems can be unfair.
In 2001, Gebru started studying at Stanford University. She earned bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees in engineering and computer science. Her PhD focused on computer vision, which is about teaching computers to "see" and understand images.
Career in Technology
Work at Apple and Stanford
While at Stanford, Gebru worked at Apple. She helped design parts for audio technology and later worked on software for the first iPad. She developed algorithms that could detect human shapes in images.
In 2013, Gebru began her PhD research at Stanford. She used data mining, which is like searching for patterns in huge amounts of information. She studied millions of images from Google Street View to learn about different neighborhoods in the U.S.
Her research showed that you could guess things about a community, like income or voting patterns, just by looking at the cars on the streets. For example, if a neighborhood had more pickup trucks than sedans, it was more likely to vote for the Republican party. This work got a lot of attention from news outlets like the BBC News and The New York Times.
Founding Black in AI
In 2015, Gebru went to a major AI conference. Out of thousands of people, she noticed very few were Black. The next year, she was the only Black woman out of 8,500 attendees.
This experience led her and her colleague Rediet Abebe to start Black in AI. This group helps support and connect Black researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. Their goal is to make AI more diverse and welcoming to everyone.
Research at Microsoft
In 2017, Gebru joined Microsoft as a researcher. She worked in a lab that focused on Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics in AI (FATE).
There, she co-wrote a famous paper called Gender Shades. The study tested facial recognition software from different companies. It found that the software was much less accurate at identifying women with darker skin compared to men with lighter skin. This research showed that AI systems could have the same unfair biases as humans.
Working on AI Ethics at Google
In 2018, Gebru joined Google to co-lead a team on the ethics of artificial intelligence. Her job was to study how AI affects people and find ways to make technology do more social good.
In 2019, Gebru and other scientists signed a letter asking Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to police. They were concerned it was biased against women and people of color. Gebru believes that facial recognition is too risky to be used for law enforcement right now.
Leaving Google
In 2020, Gebru co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜". A "stochastic parrot" is a term for an AI that can sound smart but doesn't truly understand what it's saying, like a parrot repeating words.
The paper discussed the risks of very large AI language models. These risks included harm to the environment, high costs, and the potential for the AI to learn and spread unfair biases or false information.
Google managers asked Gebru to withdraw the paper or remove the names of Google employees from it. Gebru asked for more information about their concerns. Soon after, Google told her they were accepting her resignation. Gebru has always said that she did not resign and was fired.
The head of AI at Google, Jeff Dean, said the paper ignored recent research. The situation led to a lot of debate. Nearly 2,700 Google employees and over 4,300 other experts signed a letter supporting Gebru. After the incident, Google's CEO apologized for how it was handled and promised to review the company's policies.
Independent Research Institute
In December 2021, Gebru launched the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). It is an independent research center that studies the effect of AI on marginalized communities, or groups of people who are often overlooked.
DAIR focuses on communities in Africa and on African immigrants in the U.S. One of its first projects uses AI to study satellite images of towns in South Africa. The goal is to better understand the long-term effects of apartheid, a past system of racial segregation.
Gebru has also criticized some popular ideas about the future of technology. She worries that focusing too much on creating super-intelligent AI could lead to harmful outcomes, similar to past movements like eugenics. She believes scientists should focus on making today's technology safer and fairer for everyone.
Awards and Recognition
- In 2019, Gebru and her co-researchers won an AI for Good award for their Gender Shades project.
- In 2021, Fortune magazine named her one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders.
- In 2021, the science journal Nature named her one of ten people who shaped science that year.
- In 2022, Time magazine included her on its list of the 100 most influential people.
- In 2023, she was honored with the Great Immigrants Award by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
- In 2023, she was named to the BBC's 100 Women list of inspiring and influential women.
See also
In Spanish: Timnit Gebru para niños
- Coded Bias
- Claire Stapleton
- Meredith Whittaker
- Sophie Zhang
