![]() ![]() Timnit said that much of her time is being spent on developing a sustainable revenue model, as two-year grants lead to precarious and uncertain situations. One challenge is their funding model, where they are supported by grants from a number of foundations. Ciira wa Maina, a DAIR Advisory Committee Member, is doing data science for environmental conservation and food security. Timnit posed the question, how do we do research that benefits specific communities, such as in Nyeri, Kenya where Dr. For Timnit, these values are difficult to enact within current academic incentives that have researchers chasing deadlines, rushing to conferences, and following the H-index, with researchers preoccupied with how much we are maximizing research impact. In addition, DAIR is developing guidelines to encourage researchers to prioritize their health and resist putting out papers so quickly. This amounts to discriminatory exploitation,” Timnit explained. Also, DAIR values healthy thriving researchers and promotes healthy workloads, “an alternative to the idea that great researchers should be working up to 96-hours per week. They are doing this work for free out of necessity, and DAIR will be finding ways to compensate this labour. At DAIR, Timnit explained, “following this value, we would probably put in more money per resource, so we would have to accept ‘less work’ to make sure appropriate people are compensated.” For example, one project at DAIR involves coordinated social media activity done by people who are victims of online harassment. She explained that the goal was to create a different incentive structure antithetical to the standard model that requires the most productivity for least pay, leading to extractive relationships. The name speaks to how her teams are so distributed: across Africa, Europe, Australia, North America, and despite the coordination challenges, this distribution allows for a clearer picture of how technology is harming people around the world.Īfter her firing from Google and based on her overall experiences from both academia and the corporate world, she wanted to create a different space to conduct AI research. Timnit Gebru visited the Digital Democracies Institute and shared with us some context and direction for the newly established Distributed AI Research Institute, of which she is the founder and executive director.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |