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Reading through some of her earlier tweets there seemed to have been conflict around her/ her team pursuing a particular research direction or projects, directi

Reading through some of her earlier tweets there seemed to have been conflict around her/ her team pursuing a particular research direction or projects, directions that higher ups were not happy about because of how it might make Google look. This is ultimately the limitation of being a researcher in a company - some topics will be off limits and you’re not allowed to poke around things that will make the company look bad. By virtue of their research area, her and her team no doubt push against this limit very often. Based on this, I’m not sure it’s possible to really pursue many lines of research inquiry into AI ethics and fairness within a place like Google.

techbusters 6y ago
yeah really makes you wonder why these tech companies pretend to be the good guys and hire ethics teams, when they don't intend to follow through when conflicts of interests arise.
jl2718 6y ago
Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? What is considered the leading edge of the field of in AI ethics research? Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Was her google street view result related to ethics? I would assume that ethics research would involve how an AI can learn to act ethically. Perhaps something about how an AI treats a sentient versus non-sentient impediment, like how it would decide whether to stop for ducklings or just run them over, whether it has the ability to learn a function for long-term social implications of its actions, specifically longer than the training stimulus, which is the remarkable function of the human prefrontal lobe, or only considers short-term task reward.
- manux 6y ago
  > Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? Yes. [1] > Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Yes. [1] [1] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=timnit+gebru&btnG=&oq=timnit+ https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=timni...
- visarga 6y ago
  She had a highly cited paper in 2018 about "Gender Shades", second author. The paper is about dataset bias and the creation of a small size benchmark for bias detection.
  - jl2718 6y ago
    Okay; I see. I misunderstood her field of research under the ‘AI Ethics’ umbrella. She’s clearly a leader in the field of algorithmic fairness and social accountability, and this was her work prior to Google, so it seems her criticisms/activism would not have been completely divergent from expectations. It can’t be known without details, but, does it not look like a case of google getting exactly what they hired for?

techbusters 6y ago

yeah really makes you wonder why these tech companies pretend to be the good guys and hire ethics teams, when they don't intend to follow through when conflicts of interests arise.

jl2718 6y ago

Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? What is considered the leading edge of the field of in AI ethics research? Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Was her google street view result related to ethics? I would assume that ethics research would involve how an AI can learn to act ethically. Perhaps something about how an AI treats a sentient versus non-sentient impediment, like how it would decide whether to stop for ducklings or just run them over, whether it has the ability to learn a function for long-term social implications of its actions, specifically longer than the training stimulus, which is the remarkable function of the human prefrontal lobe, or only considers short-term task reward.

manux 6y ago
> Are there any publications or results that show what she accomplished as a research scientist at google? Yes. [1] > Had she accomplished something of great distinction in this field prior to google? Yes. [1] [1] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=timnit+gebru&btnG=&oq=timnit+ https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=timni...
visarga 6y ago
She had a highly cited paper in 2018 about "Gender Shades", second author. The paper is about dataset bias and the creation of a small size benchmark for bias detection.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Okay; I see. I misunderstood her field of research under the ‘AI Ethics’ umbrella. She’s clearly a leader in the field of algorithmic fairness and social accountability, and this was her work prior to Google, so it seems her criticisms/activism would not have been completely divergent from expectations. It can’t be known without details, but, does it not look like a case of google getting exactly what they hired for?