event • HRI Science Lecture Series on AI

The Quest for Ethical Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Timnit Gebru

Tuesday, March 8, 2022
4 PM ET
Online on Zoom

Photo courtesy of Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru will discuss why she founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) and what she hopes this interdisciplinary, community-based, global network of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers can accomplish.

Speaker

Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google—where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team—in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. 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. Gebru also cofounded 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.

Discussant

Himabindu “Hima” Lakkaraju is an assistant professor at Harvard University focusing on explainability, fairness, and robustness of machine learning (ML) models. She works with various domain experts in policy and healthcare to understand the real-world implications of explainable and fair ML. Both MIT Tech Review and Vanity Fair named Lakkaraju one of the world’s top innovators under 35. Her research has received best paper awards at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) and INFORMS. She has given keynote talks at various top ML conferences and workshops, including CIKM, ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, and CVPR. Her research has been showcased by popular media outlets including the New York Times, TIME magazine, and Forbes. More recently, she cofounded the Trustworthy ML Initiative to enable easy access to resources on ML and to build a community of researchers and practitioners.

Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the following funds that are supporting this event:
Mary E. and Clara Z. Costanza Fund for Science
Melanie Mason and David W. Niemiec Fund for Science

AI Expert Calls for a Shift to Ethical AI Research at Radcliffe Institute Event (Harvard Crimson, 3/9/22)