Timnit Gebru
1983 – present
Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-born computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and data mining. She co-authored the Gender Shades study documenting accuracy disparities in commercial facial analysis systems, co-founded the group Black in AI, and co-led Google's Ethical AI team. In 2021 she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Timnit Gebru.
- Ada Yonath (1939–2026) Overlapped 43 years →
- Adonis (1930–present) Overlapped 43 years →
- Ai Weiwei (1957–present) Overlapped 43 years →
- Akira Yoshino (1948–present) Overlapped 43 years →
- Alex Ferguson (1941–present) Overlapped 43 years →
- Ali Daei (1969–present) Overlapped 43 years →
Life events
She left Ethiopia during the Eritrean-Ethiopian War as a teenager and settled in Massachusetts.
She worked on audio hardware and signal processing for Apple products after completing her undergraduate studies.
Her doctoral research, supervised by Fei-Fei Li, used images from Google Street View to estimate demographic patterns across United States neighbourhoods.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgShe co-founded the organisation with Rediet Abebe to increase the presence of Black researchers in artificial intelligence.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgThe paper reported that commercial facial analysis systems had substantially higher error rates for darker-skinned women than for lighter-skinned men.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgHer employment ended after a dispute over a paper on the risks of large language models; Google stated that she had resigned, while Gebru said she had been fired.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgShe launched DAIR as an independent, community-rooted artificial intelligence research institute.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgTime magazine included her among its one hundred most influential people of the year.
Source: en.wikipedia.org