{"id":20883,"date":"2022-01-12T16:59:13","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T16:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoklahomaeagle.net\/?p=20883"},"modified":"2022-01-12T16:59:13","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T16:59:13","slug":"20883","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/2022\/01\/12\/20883\/","title":{"rendered":"After Being Fired By Google, Timnit Gebru Bounces Back With An AI Research Institute Of Her Own"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nwww.afrotech.com<\/a>
\nBy Bernadette Giacomazzo<\/a>\n<\/div>\n

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\nAbout a year ago, Google fired their star artificial intelligence (AI) researcher. Now, she\u2019s bounced back with a firm of her own that received $3.7 million in funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation,<\/a> Kapor Center, Open Society Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.<\/p>\n
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We are @DAIRInstitute<\/a> \u2014 an independent, community-rooted #AI<\/a> research institute free from #BigTech<\/a>‘s pervasive influence. Founded by @timnitGebru<\/a>. https:\/\/t.co\/t7UyaVfmVH<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Distributed AI Research Institute (@DAIRInstitute) December 2, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 
\nThe Washington Post tells the story of Timnit Gebru, a prominent artificial intelligence computer scientist who just founded Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR)<\/a>. The institute, according to the outlet, \u201caims to both document harms and develop a vision for AI applications that can have a positive impact on the same groups.\u201d
\nAnd there\u2019s no better person to lead that charge than Gebru, who was instrumental in noting that facial recognition software has a bias against people of color. Google, for its part, fired Gebru after she published an academic paper critiquing the tech giant on what\u2019s known as \u201clarge language models,\u201d which is used to help conversational search queries.
\n\u201cI\u2019ve been frustrated for a long time about the incentive structures that we have in place and how none of them seem to be appropriate for the kind of work I want to do,\u201d she said to the Washington Post.<\/a>
\nDAIR also has a laundry list of influential and powerful people on its board. Safiya Noble, a recent recipient of the MacArthur Genius grant and author of Algorithms of Oppression, is a member of DAIR\u2019s advisory committee, along with Ciira wa Maina, co-founder of Data Science Africa, who has researched food security, climate change, and conservation,<\/a> according to the Post.
\nBut, as AfroTech previously reported, Google has been under fire for its practices in the past. Recently, a Black Google employee revealed<\/a> that he was stopped and questioned by security after being reported as a suspicious person by someone at the company. Even their initiatives in \u201caddressing the diversity gap\u201d<\/a> have been accused of window-dressing by critics.<\/a>\n<\/div>\n

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She tried to bring things to Google’s attention in 2019<\/h3>\n
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According to the Washington Post, Gebru first began telling Google about their problems in 2019. At that time, the Ethiopian native with Eritrean heritage said that the tech giant needed non-English expertise in technology like detecting toxicity in online comments.<\/p>\n

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Gebru said that her observations were met with pushback from the higher-ups, who said that there was \u201csufficient expertise\u201d on international audiences.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

 
\nGoogle had no comment for the Post.\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

www.afrotech.com By Bernadette Giacomazzo   About a year ago, Google fired their star artificial intelligence (AI) researcher. Now, she\u2019s bounced back with a firm of her own that received $3.7 million in funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Kapor Center, Open Society Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. We are @DAIRInstitute \u2014 an independent, community-rooted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20886,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132,103,105,114],"tags":[],"thb-sponsors":[],"class_list":["post-20883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-african-american","category-featured","category-national","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20883\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20883"},{"taxonomy":"thb-sponsors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thb-sponsors?post=20883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}