Timnit Gebru’s New Research Group Wants to Free AI From Its Corporate Ills

Exactly one year after Timnit Gebru was dismissed from her post at Google, the prominent expert in artificial intelligence ethics announced plans for a new AI research institute, designed to be an independent group committed to diverse points of view and preventing harm.

Gebru has lined up funding from the Ford, MacArthur, Kapor Center, Rockefeller and Open Society foundations for the center — called DAIR , or Distributed AI Research — and plans to hire five researchers over the next year. The group’s first research fellow, Raesetje Sefala, is based in South Africa and studies how computer vision algorithms and satellite images can be used to track the legacy of spatial apartheid — the segregation of minority groups in certain areas, Gebru said in an interview.