ICDS Events

CSRAI Lecture: “The Quest for Ethical Artificial Intelligence”

Date: Tuesday, March 29

Time: 2:00 p.m.

Location: Online

This event is hosted as part of the Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence’s Distinguished Lecture Series in partnership with the College of Information Sciences and Technology. The series highlights world-renowned scholars of repute who have made fundamental contributions to the advancement of socially responsible artificial intelligence. The series aims to provoke attendees and participants to have thoughtful conversations and to facilitate discussion among students, faculty, and industry affiliates of the Center.

2:00-2:45 p.m. – Presentation
2:45-3:00 p.m. – Q&A Session
3:00-4:00 p.m. – Group Discussion (students and emerging AI practitioners are encouraged to attend)

“The Quest for Ethical Artificial Intelligence”

The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) was launched in December 2021 by Timnit Gebru as a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence. Gebru believes that the harms embedded in AI technology are preventable and that when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes, it can be put to work for people, rather than against them. With DAIR, Gebru aims to create an environment that is independent from the structures and systems that incentivize profit over ethics and individual well-being. In this talk, Gebru will discuss why she founded DAIR and what she hopes this interdisciplinary, community-based, global network of AI researchers can accomplish.

About the Speaker:

Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Gebru also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian high school students, free of charge.

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