Since its inception, ChatGPT has not only quickly gained widespread popularity but has also reignited the global expectations for the development of AI.
In the eyes of many, the in-depth development of large language models is likely to help AI move towards the path of general artificial intelligence.
In this process, it will not only have a profound impact on countless industries but also bring about disruptive shaping and transformation to people's production and lifestyle.
However, it is evident that the broad prospects for the development of this technology are inseparable from the promotion of the practitioners behind it. Among them, the power of women should not be underestimated.
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They may lead and innovate in the development of AI, or promote the resolution of AI hallucinations, algorithmic biases, and other issues, or strengthen relevant legislation to enable AI to alleviate social inequality and truly serve the public...Based on this, as this year's International Women's Day approaches, DeepTech has specially compiled the following 15 influential women in the field of AI.
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Fei-Fei Li — Stanford University, USA
Born in Beijing, China in 1976, she grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan. At the age of 15, she moved to the United States. Between 1995 and 1999, she majored in Physics at Princeton University in the United States, while also studying Computer Science and Engineering.
Subsequently, Fei-Fei Li earned her Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2005. In 2009, she served as an assistant professor at Stanford University in the United States, and was promoted to full professor in 2018.
In fact, her main contribution in the field of AI is the creation of ImageNet, an image database that has driven the rapid development of computer vision in the 2010s.As early as 2006, Fei-Fei Li began researching the database; by 2009, with the help of her team and crowdsourced workers, she had labeled 3.2 million images.
In addition, in 2017, she co-founded the non-profit organization AI4ALL, dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.
It is reported that she was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine in the United States in 2020, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
Clara Shih - Salesforce
She was born in Hong Kong, China in 1982. Her father was initially a mathematics professor and later became an electrical engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States, while her mother was an art and special education teacher.In 2005, she graduated from Stanford University in the United States with a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science. In 2006, she first joined Salesforce, a company headquartered in San Francisco, USA, leading a team to build an application platform.
In 2009, Shi Zongwei left the company to establish Hearsay Systems, a company that helps financial services and insurance companies to use social media in a compliant manner.
In 2020, she returned to Salesforce as the CEO of Salesforce AI, helping the company to minimize the associated risks while using new AI technologies, allowing users to safely use generative AI.
These risks are not trivial, after all, even ChatGPT can sometimes cause problems, and unless users opt out, OpenAI can use the data they input into ChatGPT to train their own AI models.
Nancy Xu - MoonhubNancy Xu, who is currently 26 years old, is the founder and CEO of Moonhub. The company was founded in June 2022 and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States.
She hopes to use AI to connect companies with top talent while creating a more equitable hiring process.
It is reported that she began working on the project while pursuing her Ph.D. in the AI Lab at Stanford University in the United States, with the aim of building AI that provides job opportunities for people.
It is understood that recruiters can ask Moonhub's AI agents to screen candidates for a position and view a list of options within minutes.
Then, they can also ask questions based on specific needs to further narrow down the search, such as candidates with different levels of experience or specific skill proficiency.It can be seen that this tool is beneficial in helping the recruitment team to find more diverse candidates and to flag potential biased searches. Currently, the tool has been used by more than 100 companies worldwide.
Sougwen Chung — Scilicet
She is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher, and the founder and artistic director of the Scilicet studio.
Before exploring AI art, she created many smooth-line abstract artworks. Later, she trained a neural network based on decades of her paintings and developed a robot capable of drawing in real time.
Specifically, when she draws a line, the robot will extend it outward on the basis of imitation, with new ideas and patterns.These advanced robots can not only draw experience from her past artistic works but also sense her current mental state.
That is to say, the robots can be connected to her electroencephalogram (EEG) data and alpha brainwaves, and when the latter enters a meditative flow state, the former can paint more actively.
It is understood that recently she and her team have mainly been using a 3D motion capture system to create sculptures and are researching how to power their system with alternative energy sources such as microbial batteries.
Lin Yonghua - Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence
She was born in 1971, and successively obtained her bachelor's and master's degrees from Xi'an Jiaotong University. She served as the first female dean of the IBM China Research Institute and is also an IBM Global Distinguished Engineer.Currently, she serves as the Deputy Director and Chief Engineer of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Chair of the IEEE Women in Engineering Beijing Chapter, and a member of the IEEE Women in Engineering Asia-Pacific Leadership Team.
As one of the innovators leading global AI systems, she has 18 years of research experience in fields such as system architecture, cloud computing, and computer vision. She has not only obtained over 50 global patents but was also recognized as one of Forbes China's 50 Leading Women in Technology in 2019.
It is understood that she not only encourages young people committed to the field of computer science to actively explore the integration of AI with various industry fields but also advocates for more women to join the research on AI, using their unique perspectives to jointly promote the development of AI technology to be more perfect.
Alondra Nelson — White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Born in 1968, she is an American scholar, policy advisor, non-profit organization manager, and writer.From 2021 to 2023, she served as Deputy Assistant to President Biden and the Principal Deputy Director for Science and Society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. From February to October 2022, she performed the duties of the Director.
As the first African American and the first black woman to lead the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, she oversaw the release of the "Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights" in October 2022.
Although the document is not legally binding or enforceable, it proposes a framework that she hopes AI builders and policymakers will adhere to, to ensure that AI truly serves the public and does not just bring blessings to the tech industry.
Moreover, she also hopes that this document can prompt the US Congress to draft and pass AI legislation as soon as possible.
It is reported that she left the White House in February 2023 but still holds several influential positions, such as the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.Daniela Amodei —— Anthropic
She and her brother Dario Amadei both previously worked at OpenAI. In 2021, they co-founded the world-leading AI laboratory, Anthropic, with the hope of making progress in fundamental research and building stronger, more general, and more reliable AI systems.
Specifically, Anthropic has conducted research on "mechanism interpretability," aiming to help developers gain a deeper understanding of the actual internal workings of AI systems. After all, the textual output of an AI model alone cannot truly reflect the system's inherent principles of operation.
Additionally, the company has developed a new method to achieve AI system alignment and integrated it into the chatbot Claude2, which is one of the most formidable competitors to GPT-4.
It should be noted that this method allows developers to instill a set of codified values into AI, rather than letting it imperfectly set through reinforcement learning from human feedback.Anna Makanju —— OpenAI
Before she became the Vice President of Global Affairs at OpenAI, she worked in technical regulation at Facebook and taught at Princeton University in the United States. Additionally, she worked for eight years in the Obama administration, serving as a policy advisor to Vice President Biden.
In September 2021, Anna Makanju joined OpenAI and, in the year following the launch of ChatGPT, met with leaders from around the world alongside CEO Sam Altman, advising them on how to deal with this rapidly emerging technology.
"Everyone is striving to find this balance, ensuring that innovation remains feasible while having the 'guardrails' needed to ensure that innovation proceeds smoothly," she said to the media.
Ensuring that AI technology can truly be regulated by everyone is an important part of her work. For this, she has always tried to adopt a collaborative approach as much as possible.It is foreseeable that in the near future, no matter what AI regulations emerge around the world, she may make her own contributions to them.
Lila Ibrahim —— Google DeepMind
She currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Google DeepMind, which is an AI company that was acquired by Google in 2014.
Her previous experience working at companies such as Intel, Kleiner Perkins, and Coursera has been beneficial in managing the day-to-day operations of DeepMind and leading the company's responsibility and governance efforts.
Since the establishment of DeepMind, the industry has been paying attention to how to develop safe AI systems. Although the company has also developed technologies similar to ChatGPT, it has no plans to release it due to concerns that it might provide answers that do not align with the facts.In May 2023, she co-signed a statement with the company's founders Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg, declaring that the risks posed by AI should be taken as seriously as the risks of pandemics and nuclear war. Currently, she is responsible for mitigating these risks.
Abeba Birhane — Mozilla Foundation
Born in Ethiopia, Africa, she focuses on the intersection of complex adaptive systems, machine learning, algorithmic bias, and critical race studies. Currently, she is a Senior Researcher in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation.
It is clear that AI models are being trained on increasingly larger datasets, which are collected from the internet.
However, she realized that as these datasets grow from millions to billions, few have systematically checked for harmful materials within them, which could lead to AI becoming structurally racist, sexist, and biased in other ways.Based on this, she and her team pioneered a new discipline, that is, the audit of AI training datasets that can be publicly accessed.
She and her team found that AI models trained on larger datasets are more likely to exhibit harmful biases and stereotypes. Moreover, as the scale of the dataset expands, these issues also become more severe.
Margaret Mitchell — Hugging Face
She is dedicated to researching algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. In 2005, she received her bachelor's degree from Reed College in the United States; in 2009, she obtained her master's degree from the University of Washington; in 2013, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen in the UK.
In 2016, she began working at Google, during which time she co-founded and co-led the Google AI Ethics Team with Timnit Gebru.Two individuals published a paper in 2020, suggesting that large language models have exacerbated social inequality, partly because companies have decided to prioritize scale over safety.
Later, she left Google to join the AI startup Hugging Face, where she currently serves as the Chief AI Ethics Scientist. At the company, she focuses on ensuring that open-source AI can bring as many benefits as possible while minimizing harm.
It is worth mentioning that she is also the founder of Widening NLP, an organization aimed at increasing the proportion of women and minorities engaged in natural language processing work.
Kate Kallot — Amini
She is the founder and CEO of Amini, an AI startup dedicated to addressing the scarcity of environmental data in Africa.Before founding this company, she had over a decade of experience leading AI innovation at technology companies such as NVIDIA, Intel, and Arm, proposing cutting-edge technological solutions that could drive social impact and societal change.
It is understood that Amini primarily uses satellite imaging and AI to collect and process environmental data to understand the specific conditions occurring on the ground with precision to the square meter.
These data not only help unlock development methods that can feed the global population, as climate change is disrupting current food production and supply, but also allow insurance companies to provide policies with more confidence to small farmers, protecting the latter from financial losses in the event of the most severe climate-related incidents.
"If we reach the target level, you will see a completely different Africa in a few years," she said to the media.
Kate Crawford — Microsoft ResearchCurrently 51 years old, she is a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Technology and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research.
Over the past two decades, she has primarily focused her research on the impact of large-scale data systems on the environment and how they affect our social and political systems.
She has authored a book on the environmental impact of AI titled "The Atlas of AI," in which she argues that AI is the extractive industry of the 21st century. Its sole mode of operation is to extract vast amounts of data, human labor, and social resources, including energy, water, and minerals. With the advent of generative AI, its impact is set to be even more amplified.
Additionally, she co-founded the AI Now Institute in the United States to study the societal impacts of AI and to conduct policy research aimed at addressing the concentration of power in the tech industry.
Currently, she is examining the significant impact generative AI will have from perspectives including sociology, history, law, and technology.Inioluwa Deborah Raji — Mozilla Foundation
She is a Canadian computer scientist and activist, currently serving as a researcher at the Mozilla Foundation, focusing on the fields of algorithmic bias and algorithmic auditing.
Her work centers on developing methods to audit AI systems both within and outside of AI companies to prevent gender and racial biases inherent in AI technology.
For example, she has collaborated with Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence team to introduce a more comprehensive internal assessment process for AI systems.
She has also partnered with the Algorithmic Justice League to formulate an "external auditing" strategy for the latter's "Gender Shades" auditing project.It is understood that the project evaluated the accuracy of AI gender classification tools, which are developed by companies such as IBM and Microsoft and can be used in many fields such as image classification and face recognition.
Emily M. Bender - University of Washington, USA
Since 2003, she has been teaching at the University of Washington in the United States and currently holds positions such as Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory.
Even before the emergence of ChatGPT, she has become a debunker of machine learning myths, not only dispelling the field's over-promise of AI capabilities but also opposing the idea that these systems will become fully intelligent.
"You can't expect machine learning systems to learn things that are not in the training data, otherwise it is expecting magic," she said to the media.She has been researching the direct risks brought by large language models, such as intensifying biases and contaminating the information ecosystem; they usually do not perform very well in parsing languages other than English.
Therefore, when these models are integrated into critical infrastructure, they pose risks to non-English speakers.
It is understood that her work has helped shape legislators' views on the necessity of AI bias and regulation.
It is practitioners represented by these women in the field of AI who have made significant contributions to the development and improvement of AI. Therefore, on this special day dedicated to women, they deserve to be better commemorated. Also, taking this opportunity, I wish all female readers a happy holiday!
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