How Abeba Birhane is cleaning up AI’s dirty data

The cognitive scientist recently launched her own lab dedicated to AI accountability.

One day in 2020, Abeba Birhane found herself on Wikipedia, scouring a list of slurs. At the time, Birhane was pursuing a PhD in cognitive science at the University College Dublin and was trying to see how many of those slurs appeared in the image descriptions for a massive data set that’s often used to train AI systems.