Dr. Abeba Birhane: The Researcher Holding AI Accountable for Its Data

Born in Ethiopia and trained as a cognitive scientist, Dr. Birhane occupies an unusual position in the AI world. While much of the field races to scale up models and ship products, she has spent years doing the slower, less glamorous work of actually examining what those models are trained on. The question driving her research is deceptively simple: if AI systems learn from data, what happens when that data is deeply flawed?

The answer, she has found, is exactly what you would expect.