ISSUE 48/DEC2022 - Flipbook - Page 74
Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
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Africa’s Most Influential Women | EVERYDAY HEROES
Timnit Gebru
ERITREA|US
SCIENCE & TECH: Activist
“
She is a co-founder
of Black in AI, which
promotes the presence,
visibility and wellness of
Black people in the field
of artificial intelligence.
74 l
New African Woman
l Dec 2022
|
Computer Scientist
Timnit Gebru, the founder of the
Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Research Institute, is well-known in
the international tech sector. She is
an artificial intelligence researcher
who is working to lessen the
potential negative effects of AI.
Gebru co-led the Ethical Artificial
Intelligence research team until
her firing from Google, which
sparked a labour movement and
led to the formation of the first
union for Google tech workers.
This incident brought worldwide
attention and shone a light on
inequalities in the science and
technology sector that affect how
black and people of colour use
and design technology.
Timnit is of Eritrean descent but
moved with her family to Ethiopia
and later moved to the USA. She
got her early start by landing an
internship at Apple creating audio
components circuitry in their
hardware division, she has also
worked at Fei-Fei labs as an image
data analyst and co-led a team
exploring the ethical aspects of
artificial intelligence at Google.
She also co-founded the nonprofit organisation Black in AI,
which works on efforts to promote
the presence, visibility, and
wellness of Black people in the
field of artificial intelligence, after
becoming acutely aware of the
severe lack of representation in
that field. She has been nominated
for a number of awards including
the AI Innovations Award from
VentureBeat in the category AI for
Good.
She was listed among the top ten
scientists who made significant
contributions to scientific
advancements in 2021 by the
scientific journal Nature, and she
was selected one of the world’s 50
greatest leaders by Fortune. She
is among Time Magazine’s most
influential people of 2022.
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