UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Timnit Gebru, a widely respected leader in artificial intelligence ethics research who said she lost her job at Google for raising issues about their AI practices and discrimination in the workplace, will present a free public lecture titled “The Quest for Ethical Artificial Intelligence” at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, March 29, via Zoom. No registration is required.
The talk is part of the Distinguished Lecture Series hosted jointly by the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) and the Penn State College of Information Science and Technology. It will be followed by a public Q&A session at 2:45 p.m. and group discussion at 3 p.m. for students and emerging AI practitioners.
Gebru, who previously served as co-lead of Google’s ethical AI research team, launched the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Institute in December 2021, where she aims to create an environment that is independent from the structures and systems that incentivize profit over ethics and individual well-being. In her talk, she will discuss why she founded DAIR as a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s influence, and what she hopes this interdisciplinary, community-based, global network of AI researchers can accomplish.
Gebru is known, in part, for her groundbreaking research relating to racial bias in AI algorithms. In 2018, she co-authored a study that exposed the gender and racial biases embedded in facial recognition technologies by showing how these systems are less accurate at identifying women and people of color.
She is a co-founder of Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and was named one of Nature’s “Ten people who helped shape science in 2021.” She also serves on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian high school students, free of charge.
Gebru believes that the harms embedded in AI technology are preventable and that when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes, it can be put to work for people, rather than against them.
She received her doctorate from Stanford University and completed a postdoc at Microsoft Research in New York City in the 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.
About the CSRAI Distinguished Lecture Series
This event is hosted as part of the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence's Distinguished Lecture Series in partnership with the College of Information Sciences and Technology. The series highlights world-renowned scholars of repute who have made fundamental contributions to the advancement of socially responsible artificial intelligence. The series aims to provoke attendees and participants to have thoughtful conversations and to facilitate discussion among students, faculty, and industry affiliates of the Center.
Previous lectures can be viewed at the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence website.