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Timnit Gebru, one of Google’s top artificial intelligence researchers, said the company abruptly fired her yesterday. The technical co-lead of claims officers at Google’s ethical artificial intelligence team was upset by an email she sent to her colleagues.
The email, which was sent to the Brain Women and Allies mailing list, expressed frustration that managers were trying to convince Gebru to remove a research paper. The full text was first published in Platform. “A week before you go on vacation, you see a meeting appear at 4:30 pm PST on your calendar,” it read. “Then at that meeting your manager’s manager tells you that it has been decided that you need to remove this document by next week … You are not worth having conversations about it.” , since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone the expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the Electronic Borders Foundation, etc.) is recognized or valued in this enterprise. “
After sending the email, Gebru told officials that certain conditions had to be met in order for her to remain with the company. Otherwise, she should be working on a transition plan.
Megan Kacholia, vice president of engineering at Google Research, said she could not meet the conditions and accepted Gebru’s resignation accordingly, according to OneZero. Kacholia added: “However, we believe that the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects, because some aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior incompatible with the expectations of a Google manager, “according to Gebru. On Twitter, she said the decision to fire her finally came from Google’s AI chief Jeff Dean.
Apparently, my supervisor’s manager sent an email to my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t quit – I asked for simple terms first and said I would respond when I returned from vacation. But I guess she decided for me 🙂 it’s the lawyer speaking.
– Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) December 3, 2020
Gebru is famous for his work on algorithmic bias, particularly in facial recognition technology. In 2018, she co-wrote an article with Joy Buolamwini showing that the error rates for identifying people with darker skin were much higher than the error rates for identifying people with white skin, in part. because the data sets used to train the algorithms were extremely white.
News of Gebru’s alleged shooting swept through Twitter yesterday, prompting a surge of support from colleagues and collaborators. “I have your back like you always had mine” Buolamwini tweeted. “You are brilliant and respected. You listen to these others willingly ignore. You ask tough questions not to move you forward, but to uplift the communities to which we owe our foundations. I am proud to call you sister, friend mentor leader.
Hours earlier, news broke about the National Labor Relations Board filing a complaint against Google for sacking two workers last year as a result of employee unionization efforts. At the time, Google said employees Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers violated security policies and internal systems. But the NLRB concluded that these rules violated labor laws and that Berland and Spiers had done nothing wrong.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The edge.
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