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The tech giant said in a blog post Thursday that Marian Croak, a black woman who served as the company’s vice president for six years and working on a range of projects, including getting a connection Public Wi-Fi on railways in India, will run a new center. focused on responsible AI within Google Research. The ad, which included a video interview with Croak, touted his decades of technological experience and his patents for technologies such as VoIP.
Croak will report to Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google. Ten teams focused on ethics, fairness and accessibility of AI – including the Ethics AI team, which Gebru had previously helped lead – will report to him.
The move was first reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday evening.
In the blog post, Croak pointed out how new the field of ethical AI is – it has been on the radar screens of many AI researchers for only a few years. She noted that there are “a lot of conflicts” currently on the ground, such as the over-standardization of definitions of “fairness” or “security,” which can be polarizing.
“And what I’d like to do is have people have the conversation in a more diplomatic way, maybe, than we have now, so that we can really move this area forward,” he said. she declared. It also plans to undertake a “critical assessment of all AI systems that are deployed or under development and try to understand where the gaps are” and work within Google to reduce “potential damage. “.
Until early December, when she abruptly left the company, Gebru was co-leader of Google’s artificial intelligence team. A pioneer in research into biases and inequalities in AI, she was also one of the few black employees at the company as a whole (3.7% of Google employees are black, according to the 2020 Annual Diversity Report. of the company). The researcher is also a co-founder of the Black in AI group, which aims to increase the representation of blacks in the field.
Gebru first tweeted that she was “immediately fired” for an email she recently sent to Google’s internal Brain Women and Allies mailing list. In the email, she expressed her dismay at the continued lack of diversity within the company and her frustration with an internal process related to reviewing an unpublished research paper that she has co-authored. Dean said in an email to employees at Google Research (which he also published publicly) that the article in question had not been submitted for internal review early enough before the deadline and that it ” did not respect our publication bar “.
In subsequent tweets, Gebru clarified that no one at Google had explicitly told her that she was fired. Rather, she said that Google would not meet some of her return conditions and accepted her resignation immediately because she felt her email reflected “behavior inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”
Gebru’s sudden exit angered many Google employees and other players in the tech industry which continues to simmer months later, often exposed via emotional Twitter posts. CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a note to Google (GOOG)employees soon after he left that the company would investigate what had happened.
Earlier this month, two Google employees resigned following the exit of Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, a Google researcher who, until Gebru’s abrupt departure, co-led the group with her, was put on administrative leave in January, as she confirmed to CNN Business at the time.
A Google spokeswoman has not commented on Croak’s new position beyond pointing CNN Business to the company’s blog.
Gebru could not be reached immediately for comment, but in a
Tweeter On Wednesday evening, she wrote that the announcement of Croak, another black woman, made it appear “as if we were all interchangeable” and called the movements of society since her departure “beyond gas lighting” .
“I don’t have enough words to express how horrible it is right now,” she wrote.
A Google employee familiar with the situation who requested anonymity due to privacy concerns said they and other employees initially learned of Croak’s appointment from the Bloomberg article on Wednesday night, rather than from Google itself, although a meeting Thursday confirmed the change. The employee said morale in the ethical AI group was “quite low”.
“I’m really, really pissed off,” the employee said.
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