Abeba Birhane

Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist and a senior fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation and founder & principal investigator at the Artificial Intelligence Accountability Lab (AIAL) at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She researches human behavior, social systems, and responsible and ethical AI. For this work, she was featured in Wired UK and TIME on the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI list.

Birhane works at the intersection of complex adaptive systems, machine learning, algorithmic bias, and critical race studies. Birhane's work with Vinay Prabhu uncovered that large-scale image datasets commonly used to develop AI systems, including ImageNet and 80 Million Tiny Images, carried racist and misogynistic labels and offensive images. She has been recognized by VentureBeat as a top innovator in computer vision and named as one of the 100 most influential persons in AI 2023 by TIME magazine.

Birhane’s work explores the challenges and pitfalls of automating human behavior through critical examination of existing models and audits of large scale datasets used for training models. She demonstrated patterns of problematic data collection, labelling, and use of large scale image datasets like MIT’s 80 Million Tiny Images, which was taken down as a direct result of one of her audit papers. Her paper showed that these datasets – which were used to develop numerous algorithmic tools – encode racist, misogynist, and otherwise marginalizing labels that cause downstream harms, especially towards people at the margins of society.

Birhane was awarded the 2019 NeurIPS Black in AI Best Paper Award, a 2020 VentureBeat AI Innovations in Computer Vision Award, a 2022 Fairness Accountability and Transparency (FAccT) Distinguished Paper Award, and a 2022 Lego Director’s Prize for her PhD thesis contribution, among many other honors.