Timnit Gebru

Career

Timnit Gebru served as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google and later founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), where Gebru is executive director. DAIR describes itself as an independent organization that grounds its research in community needs and local expertise.¹²

Gebru also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit working on inclusion and visibility in the field of AI, and serves on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit that teaches algorithms and programming to high school students. DAIR's site announces "Deep Unlearning", a forthcoming book by Gebru.¹²

Research

Gebru was first author of a 2017 study that used deep learning on Google Street View images to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods across the United States. With Joy Buolamwini, Gebru co-authored "Gender Shades" (2018), which measured intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification systems.⁵⁶

Gebru's work on documentation practices includes "Datasheets for Datasets" (2018), which proposes that every dataset ship with a datasheet describing its motivation, composition, collection process and recommended uses, and "Model Cards for Model Reporting" (2018), which proposes short documents reporting a trained model's evaluation across conditions and groups.³⁴

Work and contributions

• Datasheets for Datasets Published research

  First author of the 2018 paper proposing datasheets for datasets, modeled on the datasheets that accompany electronic components.³

• Model Cards for Model Reporting Published research

  Co-author of the 2018 paper proposing model cards, short documents that accompany trained models and report benchmarked evaluation and intended use cases.⁴

Timeline

1. Feb 22, 2017First author of a study estimating demographic makeup from Google Street View images with deep learning.⁵
2. 2018Co-authored "Gender Shades" with Joy Buolamwini, on accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification.⁶
3. Mar 23, 2018First author of "Datasheets for Datasets".³
4. Oct 5, 2018Co-authored "Model Cards for Model Reporting".⁴

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Co-lead of the Ethical AI research team, Google¹

Where they work

• Distributed AI Research Institute 1 person in the wiki

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