Abeba Birhane
Founder of the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin
An Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist whose audits of AI datasets exposed racist and misogynistic labels, leading MIT to withdraw a widely used dataset.
Biography
Abeba Birhane is an Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist who works at the intersection of complex adaptive systems, machine learning, algorithmic bias and critical race studies. She studied psychology and philosophy at The Open University, completed a master's in cognitive science in 2015, and earned her PhD in 2021 at the Complex Software Lab in the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin.
With Vinay Prabhu she showed in 2020 that large image datasets used to build thousands of AI systems, including ImageNet and MIT's 80 Million Tiny Images, carried racist and misogynistic labels and offensive images; MIT voluntarily took down 80 Million Tiny Images. Her work on relational ethics won the best paper award at NeurIPS's Black in AI workshop in 2019, and she has researched barriers to data sharing in Africa with Rediet Abebe and others. In 2024 she established the AI Accountability Lab at Trinity College Dublin. TIME named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023.
Notable contributions
Exposed harmful labels in major AI datasets
With Vinay Prabhu, found that ImageNet and MIT's 80 Million Tiny Images contained racist and misogynistic labels and offensive images, which led MIT to voluntarily take down 80 Million Tiny Images.
Founded the AI Accountability Lab
Established the AI Accountability Lab research group at Trinity College Dublin in 2024.
Named to the TIME100 AI list
Named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by TIME magazine in 2023.