8 ms·

It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, w

It sounds to me like Google has a policy that papers must be internally reviewed before they can be "published". She understood publish in the academic sense, while Google views sending the paper out for conference review as publishing. The paper ends up failing internal review, so per policy it must be promptly retracted. This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that the paper can be fixed. After all in her mind it is not published yet, and updates can be submitted to the conference to fix the issues. The underlying reason for the paper failing internal review looks to be that it basically condemns Google's whole approach to AI (big models) while failing to take into account some relevant research that may favor google's approach. (I have no way of guessing if it would have passed review if it did take into account those, but still condemned the approach). The massive amount of miscommunication makes her feel like she was being oppressed, due to race and or gender. Hence her aggressive tone in her emails and ultimatum. Looks like a fairly classic case of a major blowup due to poor communication.

beervirus 6y ago
Looks like a fairly classic case of a person who injects race and gender into every topic... injecting race and gender into a topic.
shuckles 6y ago
It seems like she has been working at Google for a fair amount of time. If so, I’m surprised that there was still confusion over when a paper needs to be taken through the internal review process. Outside of that, I found this to be a good summary of the situation. It omits her widely distributed email denigrating the entire diversity approach taken by Google, though.
powersnail 6y ago
While there hasn't been enough evidence to fully condemn either side, I disagree that this is just poor communication. Unless Google deliberately changed the enforcement of the policy just to mess with her, she should have known the policy. It doesn't seem to be a complicated process, and 2 weeks is a reasonably short time to wait. On the other side, Google has been in this game long enough, that they must know a paper can be updated in this case. So there wouldn't be a misunderstanding there, either. What exactly happened is unclear so far. But I doubt it will come down to just a series of misunderstanding. On a side note, I suspect that working research for a company with a conflicting interest in the same area is generally a bad idea. At some point, the dilemma of either leaving or stopping caring about it would present itself.
- shuckles 6y ago
  I will say that having many processes, selectively enforced is a common cover for disparate treatment.
  - cbsks 6y ago
    That’s a good point. How many other Google researchers have submitted papers to conferences without waiting for the 2 week internal review to complete? What happened in those cases if the paper failed the internal review? Without more context it’s impossible to tell if this was a case of discrimination or just a case a researcher not following Google’s internal policies and suffering the consequences.
    - dekhn 6y ago
      I don't have stats, but when I tried to do this it was made quite clear that I needed to submit 2 weeks early because nobody who reviews can drop their day work to do a priority review for anything less than a superpaper. Most of the people doing paper reviews (just like in academia) are busy and doing them in their "spare time" (evenings, weekends).
    - beaunative 6y ago
      I don't think we even need data on this. One or two day prior is unthinkable, just per common sense. Although data points would be valuable and appreciated but we don't really need data to understand the one or two day is just not enough time for anyone or anything. It's not like there are a bunch of dedicated reviewers, it's always other researchers who review. I don't think some of the most valued papers like MapReduce or BigTable would be reviewed in just a day or two. It's just not a reasonable amount of time in any condition in terms of reviewing research papers.
    - throwaway74453 6y ago
      I worked as a run-of-the-mill engineer at Google and was involved in publishing a paper externally. We couldn't do it the first time around because we finished only 3 days before the external deadline and there wasn't enough time to get it approved internally. This seemed to be very standard around me. People were actually submitting well ahead of time and to me it seems like that Gebru expected the rules to be bent for her if she realistically believed a single day would be enough. Let me just point out that this is a standard practice even in academic research at universities when larger teams are involved.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dheera 6y ago
That sounds like a horrible use of human hours, especially at Google salary level. Paper writing is painstaking and mentally tiring. It would be much more efficient if they reviewed results and an abstract and then decided based on that "Go ahead and write the paper and publish it" or "Don't waste time writing it up".
- hooloovoo_zoo 6y ago
  That wouldn't be effective though. Most of the time these reviews are to make sure company IP isn't being published, which could be outside the main results or abstract.
- johbjo 6y ago
  Money is not an issue at all. It's about protecting the perception of quality that comes from having Google co-authors, and ultimately the Google brand. Otherwise, everyone and their mother would milk the Google name by submitting papers in every direction.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Sure, then they should have a 2-step process. The first step should be approving writing the paper, and any high selectivity should happen at that point. The second step should be approving the final contents, and that process should not reject a high fraction of submissions and should allow resubmissions with changes. It would suck to spend 200 hours figuring out how to fight to position figures in LaTeX only to be rejected by some dudes who think the figure is confidential.
rishav_sharan 6y ago
I don't think it's miscommunication in anyway. Timnit had submitted dozens of papers before and unless the process requirements are completely new, she would be well aware of them. This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time. This feels like a classic privileged tantrum which has blown up in the face because Google refused to bend this time.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  > where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past I'm curious, is there anything in the posted information above that points to the fact they were able to go around the 2-week limit in the past? Or is that just a guess?
  - throwaway74453 6y ago
    As a side note, I worked there as a run-of-the-mill engineer and the 2 week deadline was respected as far as I can tell. I once couldn't submit a paper to an external conference exactly because there was not enough time to get the internal review and approval.
- mehrdada 6y ago
  > This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time. Jeff's email explicitly says the paper was "approved" then submitted, albeit perhaps in one day. The two-week thing might be a policy but would be immaterial if it ended up approved anyway within whatever timeframe. It sounds like a red-herring to emphasize the time-in-advance; in any case the blame, if any, is to be on whoever flipped the approval bit and did not wait for other reviewers (possibly her manager?)
  - kazamaloo 6y ago
    She sends for approval 1 day before the conference deadline, proceeds to submit the paper with conditional approval, and waits for the actual approvals. It is common practice with one side effect: if reviewers don't like certain parts of the paper, they can ask you to withdraw it (since you don't have an option to update the paper at this stage). If the paper was submitted for approval before submitting to the conference though, then they would have some room for back-and-forth engagement with updates on the paper.
LordFast 6y ago
Me thinks it's a common misconception for strongly opinionated people to believe that companies want to hire them in order for them to "fix things and make the company a better place". In reality, what every company/team/management wants is someone who will give them some constructive criticism on small mistakes here and there that are easy to fix, but ultimately act as a supportive shield for the company against /other/ criticisms. The more credible that someone is, the better, and the more sophisticated that act of supportive shielding is, the better. In exchange, the company provides support, financial or otherwise, for that someone's personal career ambitions in becoming rich and famous themselves. Anyone else see it this way? Or am I just too jaded these days?
- jcheng 6y ago
  That's pretty jaded IMHO. I would think most management wants positive change, not just to be shielded from criticism. But reasonable people can disagree about what the status quo is, how good or bad that status quo is, what counts as positive change, what timescale positive change needs to happen at, and what costs/tradeoffs they are willing to accept to accomplish positive change.
  - visarga 6y ago
    Probably Timnit and the management disagreed on "what timescale positive change needs to happen at, and what costs/tradeoffs they are willing to accept to accomplish positive change".
- hef19898 6y ago
  Sums it up pretty well. Same reason consultants are hired.
- thu2111 6y ago
  Not jaded. I think that's actually a very insightful way to put it. Heck I wouldn't even mind if a boss I had put it like that, as it's at least honest and not really unreasonable. I mean, if you go into an organisation and decide the entire premise of the organisation is irredeemably flawed then at some point your feedback is going to no longer be useful, even if some of it is on point, because "this entire enterprise is worthless" is not really an actionable view most of the time.
ehsankia 6y ago
> the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that the paper can be fixed. Asking for the review notes is one thing, it seems like the main demand Jeff refused was giving the names of every reviewer. Why would the names of the reviewers be relevant to the academic, unless they specifically wanted to use the reviewers identity in order to undermine the notes?
- _Wintermute 6y ago
  Blind peer review should be pretty obvious to anyone from an academic background anyway. Asking for reviewers names from a publisher would be an outrageous request.
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    Was this a Google internal blind peer review? It sounds more like management pushing back for management specific reasons. I'm not sure it's the same thing, or that management should expect to be able to roadblock publication at the last minute without working with the authors directly.
- throwaway74453 6y ago
  Gebru has a history of using her considerable social media following to bully people she has minor disagreements with. This alone would practically warrant anonymity to make sure the reviewers do not get doxed by her.
mehrdada 6y ago
Obviously it's hard to pass a judgement without knowing the paper contents. Reading the emails carefully, it seems Jeff acknowledges that the initial review culminated in an "approval" despite some other "reviewers" still in pending state. That is a curious detail. Presumably someone with authority must have flipped the Approval bit within that 1 day. Why that individual did not object? The two-week excuse sounds like a made-up excuse post-facto based on the written policy but clearly that alone does not seem to be the reason this blew up. This is pure speculation, but it looks like there may have been some additional backchannel from the conference reviewers to their buddies at Google that caused a follow-on sensitivity or objection later from other functions at Google, namely PR & Policy (based on her tweets), which may have been why Timnit was super curious about the identity of the feedback authors.
- academia_hack 6y ago
  The back channel theory sounds like a good point to me. Anonymous peer review is largely a charade, I'd be more surprised if Google didn't have fingers on the scales and flies on the wall at top ML venues than if they did. It's very possible that the leak/breach of anonymity is what kicked off her demands to get the names of people who filed complaints that led to the paper's retraction.
ganafagol 6y ago
I'd even expect that we only know the tip of the iceberg. You don't leave employment that you are otherwise happy with over such a thing. There were clearly conflicts brewing below the lid. This was just taken as the final straw. On both sides, I'd reasonably expect. She was dissatisfied with a bunch of things that she couldn't makr public, so she boiled over on this one. That's why many people are surprised this is such a big deal. And then she gave a ultimatum, which was great for both sides. For the employer since they could use it to get rid of her right away and make it look it's because of this (and "technically" they are right). And for her because she can use it for maximum outrage. It was a calculated provocation. Come on, if you really want to be part of a process of change, that's not how to achieve that. She is smart enough to understand this.
account42 6y ago
> The massive amount of miscommunication makes her feel like she was being oppressed, due to race and or gender. That seams a big jump. Isn't it more likely that the treatment is due to pushing for ethics in an organization whose business model is antithetical to ethics?
pankajdoharey 6y ago
Google is investing in coming up with smaller models aswell i.e "TensorFlow Lite". I think it is unjustified of her to condemn approaches at this stage, all research starts humble and almost always inefficient. People were doing Resnet-50 not so long ago and then processes improved. People came up with better configs with lesser layers YOLO for instance. So big models in and off itself isnt a problem. I dont see this as a good enough reason to resign.
cmiles74 6y ago
I think it's worth highlighting that Google's internal review of papers is probably significantly different than what we'd expect in an academic setting. I'm not big corporate entity expert, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out Google's internal review heavily weighs impacts on Google from both a public relations and earnings aspect.
4bpp 6y ago
> This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that the paper can be fixed. At most CS conferences, there is no second round of reviews (apart from a few PL ones that have been experimenting lately). If you get rejected, it's with the expectation that you make whatever changes you see fit and then submit anew to a different conference. In addition, there is generally no way to update a submitted paper after the submission deadline in such a way that the changes can still be taken into account in the single round of reviews, and making major changes after the accepting venue's review stage is very much frowned upon (as those changes would then not be reviewed). So her options would have been: 1. retract the paper; 2. get the paper rejected from the conference, and resubmit it later; 3. get the paper accepted and have it published without the major changes requested by Google, thus violating Google's policy/interests; 4. get the paper accepted and perform the major changes requested by Google at the camera-ready stage, thus violating academic convention and possibly even specific rules set out by the accepting conference. 2 is mostly 1 with more of everyone's time wasted, and 3 and 4 both violate some obligation or another. From Google's point of view, she might also well have gone for 3 without keeping them in the loop to present them with a fait accompli, and her enormous amount of social capital may have made it easy to get away with. Demanding 1 therefore seems like the most reasonable choice if they want to retain a credible norm of subjecting publications of people who work for them to prior review.

beervirus 6y ago

Looks like a fairly classic case of a person who injects race and gender into every topic... injecting race and gender into a topic.

shuckles 6y ago

It seems like she has been working at Google for a fair amount of time. If so, I’m surprised that there was still confusion over when a paper needs to be taken through the internal review process. Outside of that, I found this to be a good summary of the situation. It omits her widely distributed email denigrating the entire diversity approach taken by Google, though.

powersnail 6y ago

While there hasn't been enough evidence to fully condemn either side, I disagree that this is just poor communication. Unless Google deliberately changed the enforcement of the policy just to mess with her, she should have known the policy. It doesn't seem to be a complicated process, and 2 weeks is a reasonably short time to wait. On the other side, Google has been in this game long enough, that they must know a paper can be updated in this case. So there wouldn't be a misunderstanding there, either. What exactly happened is unclear so far. But I doubt it will come down to just a series of misunderstanding. On a side note, I suspect that working research for a company with a conflicting interest in the same area is generally a bad idea. At some point, the dilemma of either leaving or stopping caring about it would present itself.

shuckles 6y ago
I will say that having many processes, selectively enforced is a common cover for disparate treatment.
- cbsks 6y ago
  That’s a good point. How many other Google researchers have submitted papers to conferences without waiting for the 2 week internal review to complete? What happened in those cases if the paper failed the internal review? Without more context it’s impossible to tell if this was a case of discrimination or just a case a researcher not following Google’s internal policies and suffering the consequences.
  - dekhn 6y ago
    I don't have stats, but when I tried to do this it was made quite clear that I needed to submit 2 weeks early because nobody who reviews can drop their day work to do a priority review for anything less than a superpaper. Most of the people doing paper reviews (just like in academia) are busy and doing them in their "spare time" (evenings, weekends).
  - beaunative 6y ago
    I don't think we even need data on this. One or two day prior is unthinkable, just per common sense. Although data points would be valuable and appreciated but we don't really need data to understand the one or two day is just not enough time for anyone or anything. It's not like there are a bunch of dedicated reviewers, it's always other researchers who review. I don't think some of the most valued papers like MapReduce or BigTable would be reviewed in just a day or two. It's just not a reasonable amount of time in any condition in terms of reviewing research papers.
  - throwaway74453 6y ago
    I worked as a run-of-the-mill engineer at Google and was involved in publishing a paper externally. We couldn't do it the first time around because we finished only 3 days before the external deadline and there wasn't enough time to get it approved internally. This seemed to be very standard around me. People were actually submitting well ahead of time and to me it seems like that Gebru expected the rules to be bent for her if she realistically believed a single day would be enough. Let me just point out that this is a standard practice even in academic research at universities when larger teams are involved.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dheera 6y ago

That sounds like a horrible use of human hours, especially at Google salary level. Paper writing is painstaking and mentally tiring. It would be much more efficient if they reviewed results and an abstract and then decided based on that "Go ahead and write the paper and publish it" or "Don't waste time writing it up".

hooloovoo_zoo 6y ago
That wouldn't be effective though. Most of the time these reviews are to make sure company IP isn't being published, which could be outside the main results or abstract.
johbjo 6y ago
Money is not an issue at all. It's about protecting the perception of quality that comes from having Google co-authors, and ultimately the Google brand. Otherwise, everyone and their mother would milk the Google name by submitting papers in every direction.
- dheera 6y ago
  Sure, then they should have a 2-step process. The first step should be approving writing the paper, and any high selectivity should happen at that point. The second step should be approving the final contents, and that process should not reject a high fraction of submissions and should allow resubmissions with changes. It would suck to spend 200 hours figuring out how to fight to position figures in LaTeX only to be rejected by some dudes who think the figure is confidential.

rishav_sharan 6y ago

I don't think it's miscommunication in anyway. Timnit had submitted dozens of papers before and unless the process requirements are completely new, she would be well aware of them. This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time. This feels like a classic privileged tantrum which has blown up in the face because Google refused to bend this time.

ehsankia 6y ago
> where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past I'm curious, is there anything in the posted information above that points to the fact they were able to go around the 2-week limit in the past? Or is that just a guess?
- throwaway74453 6y ago
  As a side note, I worked there as a run-of-the-mill engineer and the 2 week deadline was respected as far as I can tell. I once couldn't submit a paper to an external conference exactly because there was not enough time to get the internal review and approval.
mehrdada 6y ago
> This seems more of a case of selective enforcement, where she had been allowed to go around the process in the past (or felt that she has enough leverage to be able to do so now) and then not being allowed to do so this time. Jeff's email explicitly says the paper was "approved" then submitted, albeit perhaps in one day. The two-week thing might be a policy but would be immaterial if it ended up approved anyway within whatever timeframe. It sounds like a red-herring to emphasize the time-in-advance; in any case the blame, if any, is to be on whoever flipped the approval bit and did not wait for other reviewers (possibly her manager?)
- kazamaloo 6y ago
  She sends for approval 1 day before the conference deadline, proceeds to submit the paper with conditional approval, and waits for the actual approvals. It is common practice with one side effect: if reviewers don't like certain parts of the paper, they can ask you to withdraw it (since you don't have an option to update the paper at this stage). If the paper was submitted for approval before submitting to the conference though, then they would have some room for back-and-forth engagement with updates on the paper.

LordFast 6y ago

Me thinks it's a common misconception for strongly opinionated people to believe that companies want to hire them in order for them to "fix things and make the company a better place". In reality, what every company/team/management wants is someone who will give them some constructive criticism on small mistakes here and there that are easy to fix, but ultimately act as a supportive shield for the company against /other/ criticisms. The more credible that someone is, the better, and the more sophisticated that act of supportive shielding is, the better. In exchange, the company provides support, financial or otherwise, for that someone's personal career ambitions in becoming rich and famous themselves. Anyone else see it this way? Or am I just too jaded these days?

jcheng 6y ago
That's pretty jaded IMHO. I would think most management wants positive change, not just to be shielded from criticism. But reasonable people can disagree about what the status quo is, how good or bad that status quo is, what counts as positive change, what timescale positive change needs to happen at, and what costs/tradeoffs they are willing to accept to accomplish positive change.
- visarga 6y ago
  Probably Timnit and the management disagreed on "what timescale positive change needs to happen at, and what costs/tradeoffs they are willing to accept to accomplish positive change".
hef19898 6y ago
Sums it up pretty well. Same reason consultants are hired.
thu2111 6y ago
Not jaded. I think that's actually a very insightful way to put it. Heck I wouldn't even mind if a boss I had put it like that, as it's at least honest and not really unreasonable. I mean, if you go into an organisation and decide the entire premise of the organisation is irredeemably flawed then at some point your feedback is going to no longer be useful, even if some of it is on point, because "this entire enterprise is worthless" is not really an actionable view most of the time.

ehsankia 6y ago

> the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that the paper can be fixed. Asking for the review notes is one thing, it seems like the main demand Jeff refused was giving the names of every reviewer. Why would the names of the reviewers be relevant to the academic, unless they specifically wanted to use the reviewers identity in order to undermine the notes?

_Wintermute 6y ago
Blind peer review should be pretty obvious to anyone from an academic background anyway. Asking for reviewers names from a publisher would be an outrageous request.
- cmiles74 6y ago
  Was this a Google internal blind peer review? It sounds more like management pushing back for management specific reasons. I'm not sure it's the same thing, or that management should expect to be able to roadblock publication at the last minute without working with the authors directly.
throwaway74453 6y ago
Gebru has a history of using her considerable social media following to bully people she has minor disagreements with. This alone would practically warrant anonymity to make sure the reviewers do not get doxed by her.

mehrdada 6y ago

Obviously it's hard to pass a judgement without knowing the paper contents. Reading the emails carefully, it seems Jeff acknowledges that the initial review culminated in an "approval" despite some other "reviewers" still in pending state. That is a curious detail. Presumably someone with authority must have flipped the Approval bit within that 1 day. Why that individual did not object? The two-week excuse sounds like a made-up excuse post-facto based on the written policy but clearly that alone does not seem to be the reason this blew up. This is pure speculation, but it looks like there may have been some additional backchannel from the conference reviewers to their buddies at Google that caused a follow-on sensitivity or objection later from other functions at Google, namely PR & Policy (based on her tweets), which may have been why Timnit was super curious about the identity of the feedback authors.

academia_hack 6y ago
The back channel theory sounds like a good point to me. Anonymous peer review is largely a charade, I'd be more surprised if Google didn't have fingers on the scales and flies on the wall at top ML venues than if they did. It's very possible that the leak/breach of anonymity is what kicked off her demands to get the names of people who filed complaints that led to the paper's retraction.

ganafagol 6y ago

I'd even expect that we only know the tip of the iceberg. You don't leave employment that you are otherwise happy with over such a thing. There were clearly conflicts brewing below the lid. This was just taken as the final straw. On both sides, I'd reasonably expect. She was dissatisfied with a bunch of things that she couldn't makr public, so she boiled over on this one. That's why many people are surprised this is such a big deal. And then she gave a ultimatum, which was great for both sides. For the employer since they could use it to get rid of her right away and make it look it's because of this (and "technically" they are right). And for her because she can use it for maximum outrage. It was a calculated provocation. Come on, if you really want to be part of a process of change, that's not how to achieve that. She is smart enough to understand this.

account42 6y ago

> The massive amount of miscommunication makes her feel like she was being oppressed, due to race and or gender. That seams a big jump. Isn't it more likely that the treatment is due to pushing for ethics in an organization whose business model is antithetical to ethics?

pankajdoharey 6y ago

Google is investing in coming up with smaller models aswell i.e "TensorFlow Lite". I think it is unjustified of her to condemn approaches at this stage, all research starts humble and almost always inefficient. People were doing Resnet-50 not so long ago and then processes improved. People came up with better configs with lesser layers YOLO for instance. So big models in and off itself isnt a problem. I dont see this as a good enough reason to resign.

cmiles74 6y ago

I think it's worth highlighting that Google's internal review of papers is probably significantly different than what we'd expect in an academic setting. I'm not big corporate entity expert, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out Google's internal review heavily weighs impacts on Google from both a public relations and earnings aspect.

4bpp 6y ago

> This is confusing to the academic who expects to get access to the raw review responses so that the paper can be fixed. At most CS conferences, there is no second round of reviews (apart from a few PL ones that have been experimenting lately). If you get rejected, it's with the expectation that you make whatever changes you see fit and then submit anew to a different conference. In addition, there is generally no way to update a submitted paper after the submission deadline in such a way that the changes can still be taken into account in the single round of reviews, and making major changes after the accepting venue's review stage is very much frowned upon (as those changes would then not be reviewed). So her options would have been: 1. retract the paper; 2. get the paper rejected from the conference, and resubmit it later; 3. get the paper accepted and have it published without the major changes requested by Google, thus violating Google's policy/interests; 4. get the paper accepted and perform the major changes requested by Google at the camera-ready stage, thus violating academic convention and possibly even specific rules set out by the accepting conference. 2 is mostly 1 with more of everyone's time wasted, and 3 and 4 both violate some obligation or another. From Google's point of view, she might also well have gone for 3 without keeping them in the loop to present them with a fait accompli, and her enormous amount of social capital may have made it easy to get away with. Demanding 1 therefore seems like the most reasonable choice if they want to retain a credible norm of subjecting publications of people who work for them to prior review.