Women shaping the world of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence puts a mirror in front of us to show our biases and human frailties because we train AI using our data from our actions and past histories. In a world that is not gender-equal, women can see the biases carried forward by AI easily. Hiring algorithms that prefer men to facial recognition systems to covid vaccines run by AI are trained with less of women's data leaving them to false positives from pain to missed opportunities.

Dr. Fei Fei Li is known as the creator of ImageNet Open dataset for images used in Computer Vision and image recognition. She has pioneered Natural Scene Understanding or story telling with images which is the foundation of camera based AI from autonomous vehicles to cameras watching inside the human body to weather and agricultural drones. Dr. Fei Fei Li founded Ai4All as a summer program for high school girls to bring AI to girls to get them trained to become successful AI leaders and researchers.

Dr Fei Fei Li from TED2015.png

Image: Dr.Fei Fei Li from TED2015

Dr.Fei Fei inspired me from her Ted talk in 2015 where I got my foundation of computer vision which led me to learn and bring Autonomous Vehicle courses to my students. I recently found Dr.Fei Fei wa instrumental in building AutoML while on a sabbatical year at Google. AutoML is the foundation of NoCode AI, my latest topic I teach.

Prof. Lei Fei Li's Stanford course CS231n on "Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition" has another story that inspired and created a whole set of deep learning engineers from around the world, and I am inspired to share about the ones from Nigeria.

2. Tejumade Afonja from Nigeria/Germany

Tejumade Afonja is a Deep Learning AI Data Scientist. She is a Research Assistant at CISPA and a Masters student at Universität des Saarlandes. Tejumade co-founded AI Saturdays Lagos in Nigeria and learn AI by watching and learning with fellow engineers from Nigeria. And she watched Prof. Lei Fei Li's Stanford course CS231n on "Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition" to learn CNN. Tejumade found that google search for food or bridges did not include African food and began with a dataset for African food crowdsourced similar to how Dr.Fei Fei Li did to collect images to build ImageNet Dataset. Tejumade has expanded from there to build robots to research "Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World: Improving Resilience"

Image: Tejumade Afonja of AI Saturdays

3. Joy Buolomwini from Boston

Joy is a force out to change bias in AI focused on Facial Recognition system with her thesis paper Gender Shades from MIT.

Watch Coded Bias on Netflix to get a glimpse of Joy's journey from MIT Phd student to Algorithmic Justice League leader making Facial Recognition work to getting the United States Congress to stop faulty algorithms to be biased against black women to be deployed by US Government agencies.

Watch Joy's Ted Talk

How I'm fighting bias in algorithms

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jZl55PsfZJQ"

4. Malka N. Halgamuge from Australia

We can trust IoT devices and AI only when they are security. Enter Malka Halgamuge from Melborne. She teaches Secure Programming" to the Masters students at La Trobe University in Australia.

She is a researcher on a wide range of topics from Blockchain, IoT Edge Security and impact on microwave radiation to bring technology to agriculture . Here is her Google Scholar.

5. Dr. Tahereh Saheb from Iran

Dr.Saheb's work spans Ethical AI to Digital Health. Read her Google Scholar for a wide variety of research. Her recent paper on Artificial intelligence for Sustainable Energy: A Contextual Topic Modeling and Content Analysis helps bring AI to sustainability.

6. Susanna Raj from San Jose, US

Susanna Raj is an AI Ethicist and a rising start in 100 Brilliant women in AI Ethics, a group of women you cannot afford to ignore. Susanna is bringing the world of social science and technology to bring inclusive constructs into the world of Artificial Intelligence Training. She dared to challenge technologies that claim to understand human emotions and researched and published on the topic of emotions AI.

7. Yashaswini Viswanath from Bangalore India

Yashaswini is an AI Research coming from an engineering background who is passionate about Responsible AI. She presented "Fairness Analysis and Bias Mitigation in a Responsible AI ecosystem driving AI Ethics in an AIoT environment" at IoTSlam and I am lucky to have published inclusive AI papers with her.

8. Kristine Kalnina from Barcelona

Kristine Kalnina self-taught herself Machine Learning using Azure's NoCode AI Platform. She is a UX Researcher who built a GPT-3 Conversation AI brainstorming partner for meetings. Follow Kristine to see how she shapes human computer design and AIX design.

I am inspired by these amazing women and have begin publishing my work as research instead of books or courses focusing on AIX Design and Inclusive AI in Autonomous Vehicles. I hope you will join us to share these amazing women shaping the world of AI and build upon on our or reach out to me to collaborate.

Citations

[1]Afonja, T., Klemmer, K., Salama, A., Rodriguez Diaz, P., Kalavakonda, N., and Azeez, O., “Proceedings of the NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on Machine Learning for the Developing World: Improving Resilience”, <i>arXiv e-prints</i>, 2021.

Madushanki, R., Wirasagoda, H. & Halgamuge, M. (2019). Adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Agriculture and Smart Farming towards Urban Greening: A Review. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 10 (4), pp.11-28. https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100402.

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