About the Topic:
What exactly is artificial intelligence, and why are so many companies working on it? What’s exciting about it, and what’s worrisome? Join me as I dive into the state of the art in “intelligent” technology, how the “AI” we know today has evolved, and what it all means for the future.
About our Speaker:
Margaret Mitchell is a researcher focused on the ins and outs of machine learning and ethics-informed AI development in tech. She has published around 100 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of conversation generation and sentiment classification. She has recently received recognition as one of Time's Most Influential People of 2023.
She currently works at Hugging Face as Chief Ethics Scientist, driving forward work in the ML development ecosystem, ML data governance, AI evaluation, and AI ethics. She previously worked at Google AI as a Staff Research Scientist, where she founded and co-led Google's Ethical AI group, focused on foundational AI ethics research and operationalizing AI ethics Google-internally. Before joining Google, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research, focused on computer vision-to-language generation; and was a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, focused on Bayesian modeling and information extraction.
She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen and a master's in computational linguistics from the University of Washington. While earning her degrees, she also worked from 2005-2012 on machine learning, neurological disorders, and assistive technology at Oregon Health and Science University.
She has spearheaded a number of workshops and initiatives at the intersections of diversity, inclusion, computer science, and ethics. Her work has received awards from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and the American Foundation for the Blind and has been implemented by multiple technology companies.
She likes gardening, dogs, and cats.