Timnit Gebru
Stochastic Parrots
The paper Google fired her over, and DAIR
Rating
90Impact score
Domains
Algorithmic biasAI ethicsResearch independence
Scouting report
Co-authored Gender Shades with Joy Buolamwini, measuring commercial face recognition error rates that reached 34 percent for darker-skinned women against near zero for lighter-skinned men, which forced public changes from IBM and Microsoft. Co-led Google’s ethical AI team until her exit over the Stochastic Parrots paper, then founded DAIR to do the research outside a company.
Curator’s note
The exit made the news. The measurements are why the paper mattered.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Timnit Gebru by TechCrunch, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Sources
- 01Timnit Gebru en.wikipedia.org
- 02Stochastic Parrots (2021) dl.acm.org
- 03DAIR Institute dair-institute.org