Timnit Gebru to give keynote address for the UMass ADVANCE Annual Distinguished Lecture

UMass ADVANCE is delighted to host Timnit Gebru for the annual distinguished lecture on Tuesday, March 22, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. on Zoom webinar. Gebru will be speaking on, “The Hierarchy of Knowledge in Machine Learning and Its Consequences.” Registration is required.

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The Annual Distinguished Lecture is UMass ADVANCE's major event to raise awareness about diversity, equity and inclusion issues in STEM fields and at UMass Amherst. The lecture features women in STEM with extraordinary records of leadership and vision in addressing issues DEI in STEM fields. This year's lecture is co-hosted by the Office of Equity and Inclusion and the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and is co-sponsored by the College of Engineering, College of Natural Sciences, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Computational Social Science Institute, Institute for Social Science Research and the Office of Faculty Development.

Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) and co-founder of Black in AI, an organization dedicated to increasing the presence of Black people in the field of artificial intelligence. She was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. Prior to that she was a co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data.

Funded by a five-year, $3.1M National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation Grant, UMass ADVANCE promotes gender and racial equity for STEM faculty at UMass. Through a combination of research, programming, and interventions, UMass ADVANCE seeks to understand and address systemic and intersectional inequalities at UMass and to lay the groundwork for a fairer, more equitable, diverse, and inclusive campus.  

Contact Donna Baron at dbaron@umass.edu with questions.