Timnit Gebru


I am currently a research scientist at Google in the ethical AI team. Prior to that I did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics in AI) group, where I studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data (see this New York Times article for an example of my work). I received my PhD from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, studying computer vision under Fei-Fei Li. My thesis pertains to using large scale publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise as a result. The Economist, The New York Times and others have covered part of this work. Prior to joining Fei-Fei's lab I worked at Apple designing circuits and signal processing algorithms for various Apple products including the first iPad. I also spent an obligatory year as an entrepreneur (as all Stanford undergrads seem to do). My research was supported by the NSF foundation GRFP fellowship and the Stanford DARE fellowship



Publications


Model Cards for Model Reporting

Margaret Mitchell, Simone Wu, Andrew Zaldivar, Parker Barnes, Lucy Vasserman, Ben Hutchinson, Elena Spitzer, Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Timnit Gebru

FAT* 2019

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Datasheets for Datasets

Timnit Gebru, Jamie Morgenstern, Briana Vecchione, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Hanna Wallach, Hal Daumeé III, Kate Crawford

FAT/ML 2018

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Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification

Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru

FAT* 2018

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Project Website



Fine-grained Recognition in the Wild: A Multi-Task Domain Adaptation Approach

Timnit Gebru, Judy Hoffman, Li Fei-Fei

ICCV 2017

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Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate the Demographic Makeup of Neighborhoods Across the United States

Timnit Gebru, Jonathan Krause, Yilun Wang, Duyun Chen, Jia Deng, Erez Lieberman Aiden, Li Fei-Fei

PNAS 2017

PDF Data




Scalable Annotation of Fine-Grained Objects Without Experts

Timnit Gebru, Jonathan Krause, Jia Deng, Li Fei-Fei

CHI 2017

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Fine-Grained Car Detection for Visual Census Estimation

Timnit Gebru, Jonathan Krause, Yilun Wang, Duyun Chen, Jia Deng, Li Fei-Fei

AAAI 2017

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Visual Census: Using Cars to Study People and Society

Timnit Gebru, Jonathan Krause, Yilun Wang, Duyun Chen, Jia Deng, Li Fei-Fei

CVPR BigVision 2015

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Learning Features and Parts for Fine-Grained Recognition

Jonathan Krause, Timnit Gebru, Jia Deng, Li-Jia Li, Li Fei-Fei

ICPR 2014

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Drivers of Variability in Energy Consumption

Adrian Albert, Timnit Gebru, J Ku, J Kwac, Jure Leskovec, Ram Rajagopal

ECML PKDD 2013

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Invited Talks


Predicting Demographics Using 50 Million Images

CVPR LSVisCom 2015   AI With the Best 2016   AI In FinTech Forum 2017

Other Stuff




Addis Coder: Algorithms and Programming for High Schoolers

An intensive 1 month summer class for high school students in Ethiopia, organized by Jelani Nelson. This is the most diverse/inclusive classroom I have ever been in. All regions of Ethiopia were represented with many religions and at least 10 languages (there were 85 students). There were different income levels ranging from students working as shoe shiners to put themselves through school to kids who went to private middle schools. All students currently go to public schools. The class had students from rural areas and cities, close to 50/50 female/male ratio and people with disabilities (e.g. Misgina who is deaf but is top of his class while going to a school that gives no resources for deaf people). Some kids had never touched a computer before while others have programmed in Java. But all of them currently understand the basics of recursion, dynamic programming, graphs etc. And they only took this class for one month. I hope to one day see a computer science classroom in the US that is this diverse.

Website



More Mentorship

I am involved in various outreach/mentorship activities including EDGE (2014-2016), EJHS Scholars Program (this year) and SAILORS (2015).