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Happy International Women’s Day!
To celebrate International Women’s Day, we take a look back over the past year of AIhub content and highlight some of our favourite articles, interviews, podcasts and videos, by, or featuring, women in the field.
Interviews
Falaah Arif Khan is an engineer/scientist by training and an artist by nature. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Responsible AI at New York University. When we interviewed Falaah in 2020 she had just completed her first comic book, Meet AI. She has since teamed up with other AI researchers on other exciting projects. With Julia Stoyanovich she runs the Data, Responsibly Comic series. The first in the series was entitled Mirror, mirror, and the second, with Eleni Manis joining the team, has recently hit the virtual shelves: Fairness and friends. She also runs the Superheroes of Deep Learning comic series with Zack Lipton, which documents the thrilling tales and heroic feats of ML’s larger-than-life champions.
Interview with Falaah Arif Khan – talking security, comics and demystifying the hype surrounding AI.
Nedjma Ousidhoum is a final year PhD student at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is interested in natural language processing and machine learning, and currently works on multilingual hate speech detection, classification and analysis. Her published work includes Comparative evaluation of label-agnostic selection in multilingual hate speech datasets. Nedjma is also an AIhub ambassador and has written a number of posts for us. You can find the most recent of these posts here.
Interview with Nedjma Ousidhoum – talking NLP and AI ethics.
Amy McGovern leads the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography. This is one of the inaugural NSF AI Institutes and was awarded funding in September 2020. Amy is also the Lloyd G. and Joyce Austin Presidential Professor, School of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma. She obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses on developing and applying machine learning and data mining methods for real-world applications with a special interest in high-impact weather. In our interview we spoke about her research, setting up the Institute, and some of the projects and collaborations on the horizon.
Interview with Amy McGovern – creating trustworthy AI for environmental science applications.
Eleni Vasilaki is Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Neural Engineering and Head of the Machine Learning Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. Eleni develops computational models aiming to advance our understanding of brain learning mechanisms. She is working to identify the principles that govern the modifications of neuronal connections when acquiring information, with emphasis on unsupervised and reinforcement learning. The topics explored in this interviews include neuromorphic computation, insects and active learning.
Interview with Eleni Vasilaki – talking bio-inspired machine learning.
Podcasts and videos
Ruha Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African American studies at Princeton University where she studies the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. She is author of the acclaimed Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code and is currently working on a new book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. Ruha writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice.
Radical AI podcast: featuring Ruha Benjamin.
Summarising the keynotes at ICLR: part one – this article includes coverage of Ruha’s keynote at ICLR2020: “2020 vision: reimagining the default settings of technology & society”. You can watch her talk in full here.
Abeba Birhane is a PhD candidate in cognitive science at University College Dublin in the School of Computer Science. She studies the relationships between emerging technologies, personhood and society. Abeba’s work is incredibly interdisciplinary – bridging the fields of cognitive science, psychology, computer science, critical data studies, and philosophy. Her recent publications include Towards decolonising computational sciences, Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach and Large image datasets: A pyrrhic win for computer vision?. Abeba is currently interning at DeepMind.
Radical AI podcast: featuring Abeba Birhane
Heather Knight is a computer science professor at Oregon State University. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, non-verbal machine communications and non-anthropomorphic social robots. She directs the CHARISMA (Collaborative Humans and Robots: Interaction, Sociability, Machine Learning, and Art) Research Lab, whose goal is to operationalize methods from the performing arts to make more charismatic robots.
Engineering Out Loud: S9E4 – socializing robots
Timnit Gebru is a leading AI ethics researcher and the co-founder of Black in AI. She obtained her PhD from Stanford, researching large-scale publicly available images to gain sociological insight, and working on computer vision problems that arise from these. She has previously worked at Apple, Microsoft Research and Google. With Joy Buolamwini and Inioluwa Deborah Raji, Timnit has won VentureBeat’s 2019 AI Innovations Award (AI for Good category) for research highlighting the significant problem of algorithmic bias in facial recognition, and the 2020 EFF Pioneer Award .
Radical AI podcast: featuring Timnit Gebru.
Tutorial on fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics in computer vision – this was a tutorial delivered with Emily Denton at CVPR.
Inioluwa Deborah Raji is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation researching algorithmic auditing and evaluation. She has worked closely with the Algorithmic Justice League initiative and on several projects to highlight cases of bias in computer vision. Deb has won a number of awards including the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Award in Enterprise Technology, the 2020 EFF Pioneer Award (received with Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru), and the 2020 MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 Innovator Award. She is also a member of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame.
Radical AI podcast: featuring Deb Raji
Ann Nowé is head of the artificial intelligence research group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her research interests include: reinforcement learning, learning in multi-agent systems, machine learning for data mining, transparent and explainable AI and computational biology. Ann is the leader of the Epidemiological data analysis topic group in the CLAIRE Covid-19 Initiative.
CLAIRE COVID-19 Initiative Video Series: Meet the Team Leaders – Ann Nowé
Articles
Àngela Nebot is head of the Soft Computing (SOCO) research group and a board member of the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDEAI) research Centre at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Her current research interests include fuzzy, neuro-fuzzy, genetic-fuzzy systems and other soft computing hybridization techniques, and modelling for prediction and decision support. The application areas include energy, medicine, atmospheric sciences, music, risk management and e-Learning. Àngela contributed to our focus series on climate action.
Helping decision-makers manage resilience under different climate change scenarios: global vs local
Regina Barzilay is a School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health at MIT. She is also an AI Faculty Lead for the Jameel Clinic, a MIT centre for machine learning in health. Regina has conducted research on a range of topics in computer science, ranging from explainable machine learning to natural language processing and deciphering dead languages. In recent years she has focussed her efforts on healthcare. She was awarded the inaugural Squirrel AI award in 2020 for her work on cancer diagnosis and drug discovery.
#AAAI2021 invited talk – Regina Barzilay on deploying machine learning methods in cancer diagnosis and drug design
Regina Barzilay wins $1M Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Squirrel AI award.
Marija Slavkovik is an associate professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen. She works predominantly on multi-agent systems. Her areas of expertise are artificial morality, collective reasoning and collective decision-making. Marija is the vice-chair of the Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Society and member of the informal advisory group on Ethical, Legal, Social Issues of CLAIRE.
Yolanda Gil is Senior Director for Major Strategic AI and Data Science Initiatives at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. She is also a research professor at USC. Her research focuses on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture. One recent focus has been in assisting scientists with intelligent systems that analyze data, test hypotheses, and make new discoveries. From 2018 to 2020, Yolanda was the President of AAAI. We covered her presidential address at the AAAI 2020 meeting in which she talked about some of these knowledge capture projects.
Will AI write the scientific papers of the future? – Yolanda Gil’s presidential address at #AAAI20
Carme Torras is Research Professor at the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC). She leads a number of projects, including CLOTHILDE; the aim of this research is to combine techniques from topology and machine learning to develop a general theory of cloth manipulation. One planned application of this work is to increase the autonomy of those with mobility issues, through help with dressing for example. In November, Carme won a National Research Award from the Spanish government. This is the highest distinction given in Spain and recognizes her pioneering contributions in the areas of intelligent robotics and social robotics.
ECAI plenary talk: Carme Torras on assistive AI
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