Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian American computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She is an advocate for diversity in technology and co-founder of Black in AI, a community of black researchers working in artificial intelligence (AI). She is the founder of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), which will work with AI researchers around the world, with a focus on Africa and African immigration to the United States, to examine outcomes of utilizing the technology.
In 2021, Gebru was named one of the world’s 50 great leaders by Fortune and this year she is one of Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People (Innovator): “It takes courage to speak truth to the most powerful technology companies in the world. Timnit Gebru is a truth teller”.
In December 2020, Gebru was the center of a public controversy stemming from her abrupt and contentious departure from Google as technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team. Higher management had requested she withdraw an as-yet-unpublished paper that detailed multiple risks and biases of large language models or remove the names of all Google co-authors, claiming that the paper ignored recent research that showed methods of mitigating the bias in those systems. She requested insight into the decision, and warned that non-compliance would result in her negotiating her resignation. Google terminated her employment immediately, claiming they were accepting her resignation.
Source: Wikipedia