Timnit Gebru

Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist working to infuse artificial intelligence with diversity and anti-racial bias. Gebru is the founder and executive director at The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR).

She is a former research scientist in the Ethical AI team at Google. While at Google, she finished her postdoc in the Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research, New York. Prior to that, she was a PhD student in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li.

Her main research interest is in data mining large-scale, publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result, including fine-grained image recognition, scalable annotation of images, and domain adaptation. She is currently studying the ethical considerations underlying any data mining project, and methods of auditing and mitigating bias in sociotechnical systems.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times and MIT Tech Review, among others. As a co-founder of the group Black in AI, she works to both increase diversity in the field and reduce the negative impacts of racial bias in training data used for human-centric machine learning models.