Abeba Birhane
Senior Research Fellow
Abeba Birhane is a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at Mozilla Foundation, and an Adjunct Lecturer/Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She researches human behavior, social systems, and responsible and ethical AI—work for which she was recently featured in Wired UK. Birhane’s work explores the challenges and pitfalls of automating human behavior through critical examination of existing computational models and audits of large scale datasets. She demonstrated patterns of problematic data collection, labeling, and use of large image datasets like MIT's 80 Million Tiny Images, which was taken down as a direct result of one of her papers. She demonstrated that these datasets—which were used to develop countless AI algorithms and systems—carry racist and misogynistic labels that cause direct downstream harms, especially to women and people of color. She was awarded the 2019 NeurIPS Black in AI Best Paper Award, a 2020 VentureBeat AI Innovations in computer vision Award, a 2022 FAccT Distinguished Paper Award, and a 2022 Lero Director's Prize, among many other honors.