The women of the year list in the 2024 spring edition of Women of Color magazine highlights the career achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, math, artificial intelligence, civil rights, government, administration, and the United States military who were a source of inspiration in 2023. Read the full article here.

Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist who works in artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic bias, and data mining.

She advocates for diversity in technology and is co-founder of Black in AI, a community of Black researchers working in AI.

She founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR).

Gebru has been recognized for her expertise in the ethics of artificial intelligence.

She was named one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune, one of Nature’s 10 people who shaped science in 2021, and in 2022, one of TIME’s most influential people.

In 2001, Gebru was accepted at Stanford University. There, she earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering and her Ph.D. in computer vision in 2017.

Fei-Fei Li advised Gebru during her Ph.D. program.

Gebru presented her doctoral research at the 2017 LDV Capital Vision Summit competition, where computer vision scientists give their work to industry and venture capitalists.

Gebru won the competition, starting a series of collaborations with other entrepreneurs and investors.

During her Ph.D. program in 2016 and 2018, Gebru returned to Ethiopia with Jelani Nelson’s programming campaign, AddisCoder.

While working on her Ph.D., Gebru authored a paper about her concern over the future of AI. She wrote of the dangers of the lack of diversity in the field, centered on her experiences with the police and on a ProPublica investigation into predictive policing, which revealed a projection of human biases in machine learning.

Gebru joined Apple as an intern at Stanford, working in its hardware division making circuitry for audio components, and was offered a full-time position the following year.

While at Apple, Gebru became more interested in building computer vision software to detect human figures.

She went on to develop signal processing algorithms for the first iPad. At the time, she said she had not considered the potential use for surveillance, saying, “I just found it technically interesting.”