About DAIRWe are an interdisciplinary and globally distributed AI research institute rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include diverse perspectives and deliberate processes it can be beneficial. Our research reflects our lived experiences and centers our communities.Distributed AI Research InstituteDAIR_445b9cb8-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea00The Distributed AI Research Institute is a space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech’s pervasive influence.DAIR TeamTimnit Gebru(she/her) Founder and Executive Director ~ Timnit Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR). Prior to that she was fired by Google in December 2020 for raising issues of discrimination in the workplace, where she was serving as co-lead of the Ethical AI research team. She received her PhD from Stanford University, and did a postdoc at Microsoft Research, New York City in the FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency and Ethics in AI) group, where she studied algorithmic bias and the ethical implications underlying projects aiming to gain insights from data. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian highschool students, free of charge.Alex Hanna(she/her) Director of Research ~ Dr. Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute. A sociologist by training, her work centers on the data used in new computational technologies, and the ways in which these data exacerbate racial, gender, and class inequality. She also works in the area of social movements, focusing on the dynamics of anti-racist campus protest in the US and Canada. Dr. Hanna has published widely in top-tier venues across the social sciences, including the journals Mobilization, American Behavioral Scientist, and Big Data & Society, and top-tier computer science conferences such as CSCW, FAccT, and NeurIPS. Dr. Hanna serves as co-chair of Sociologists for Trans Justice and as a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. FastCompany included Dr. Hanna as part of their 2021 Queer 50, and she has been featured in the Cal Academy of Sciences New Science exhibit, which highlights queer and trans scientists of color.Dylan Baker(they/he) Research Engineer ~ Dylan's engineering and research work is broadly focused on ethics in machine learning, particularly how it relates to data labor, classificatory systems, and identity. In addition to machine learning data engineering, their work highlights communicating across disciplines through interactive articles, data visualizations, and workshops. Prior to joining DAIR, Dylan worked as a software engineer at Google Research.Adrienne WilliamsResearch Fellow ~ Adrienne started organizing in 2018 while working as a junior high teacher for a tech owned and operated charter school. She expanded her organizing in 2020 after her work as an Amazon delivery driver during the pandemic afforded her the ability to see that many of the same issues that caused her to leave the charter schools were happening at Amazon as well. Since then she has worked both on the ground and behind the scenes with activists, politicians, researchers, and everyday people to enact positive change in the tech, labor, and education industries by exposing and educating the public on how these industries harm and ways in which that harm can be reversed. Adrienne began working as a Research Fellow at the DAIR Institute in 2022, in hopes that her unique lived experience of working within and organizing against these industries aids in pushing towards a more equitable society.Meron Estefanos(she/her) Research Fellow ~ Meron Estefanos is an activist and radio journalist. She has been fighting for the rights of kidnapped refugees, and negotiating their release for 17 years, supporting an estimated 16,000 refugees mainly from Eritrea and Ethiopia. Her work has been profiled by filmmaker Keren Shayo, in the documentary Sound of Torture. Estefanos is also co-founder of the International Commission on Eritrean Refugees (ICER) in Stockholm, Sweden, and was the host and presenter of Radio Erena’s weekly program, "Voices of Eritrean Refugees." She has received a number of honors and awards for her work and is listed in The Guardian's "No fame, no fuss: eight heroes of 2016." Despite these accolades, Estefanos continues to be threatened and harassed for her work and advocacy.Asmelash Teka HadguPart-Time Research Fellow ~ Asmelash Teka Hadgu (asme@lesan.ai) is the Co-founder and CTO of Lesan. At Lesan, he has built state-of-the-art machine translation systems to and from Amharic, Tigrinya and English. Prior to Lesan, Asmelash did his PhD at the Leibniz University Hannover where his research focused on applied machine learning for applications in scholarly communication, crisis communication and natural language processing in low resource settings. He is a part-time fellow at DAIR, developing DAIR's partnership with Lesan to create open source tools for social media analysis in Ge’ez based languages such as Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic.Milagros Miceli(she/her) Part-Time Research Fellow ~Milagros is a doctoral candidate in Computer Science at Weizenbaum Institute - TU Berlin. With a background in Sociology and Communication, her research focusses on labor conditions and power asymmetries in outsourced data work as well as their effects on machine learning datasets. Milagros has conducted ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and workshops with data annotators, collectors, and scientists in different sites around the world. Her work centers on engaging communities of precarized data workers from the Global South. More broadly, she is interested in question of legitimacy and knowledge production in data, worker-led research, labor organizing, and the intersection of Critical Data Studies and data activism.Raesetje Sefala(she/her) Part-Time Research Fellow ~ Raesetje Sefala is DAIR’s first research fellow. She uses computer vision, data science, and machine learning techniques to explore research questions with a societal impact. Her current research uses satellite imagery to study the legacy of spatial apartheid in South Africa. She holds a masters degree in computer science from the University of the Witwatersrand, and is the co-founder of Women In Computational Science Research (WiCSR), a community that empowers and encourages women’s growth and participation in the computational sciences. Raesetje’s work has been the recipient of the best poster presentation prize at the 2018 Deep Learning Indaba, and she is also the recipient of the data science for social good fellowship and the Sasol Inzalo Foundation scholarship.Safiya Noble(she/her) Advisory Committee Member ~ Prof. Safiya Noble is member of the advisory committee of the Distributed AI Research Institute. Dr. Noble is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Information Studies where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She holds appointments in African American Studies and Gender Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and has been appointed as a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). Dr. Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications.Ciira wa Maina(he/him) Advisory Committee Member ~ Dr. Ciira wa Maina is a member of the advisory committee of the Distributed AI Research Institute. He is a lecturer at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, Kenya where he conducts research in a number of areas including bioacoustics, IoT, machine learning and data science. Dr. Maina’s research ranges from using audio recordings obtained in the Mt Kenya ecosystem to perform biodiversity assessment, focusing on bird species which serve as an indicator species, to investigating the feasibility of use of the Internet of Things (IoT) by farmers in Kenya to monitor crop growing and storage conditions to improve yields and prevent food waste, and works on environmental monitoring like developing sensor systems to monitor the Upper Ewaso Nyiro river basin to help address challenges related to water resources management. Dr. Maina is also a co-founder of Data Science Africa, a community of data scientists on the African continent with workshops, summer schools, fellowships and monthly research seminars for the community.DAIR SupportersDAIR is supported by grants from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, The Rockefeller Foundation, and a gift from the Kapor Center.MacArthur FoundationFord FoundationOpen Society FoundationsThe Rockefeller FoundationKapor CenterDAIR PartnersIn addition to our team members, DAIR also works with the people and organizations below.Code for Science & SocietyThe DAIR Institute is a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society (CS&S), a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting open collaboration in public interest technology.Meaza AbateOur website was developed by Meaza Abate ...Dionna Dorseyour logo and color scheme were designed by Dionna Dorsey ...Spitfire Strategiesand we have communications support from Spitfire Strategies.Researchers across the globe can set the agenda and conduct AI research rooted in their communities and lived experiences_445b9eb6-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea00To counter Big Tech’s pervasive influence on the research, development and deployment of AI_445b9ff6-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea00CommunityCommunity, not exploitation ~ We believe that research should center the voices and experiences of those most impacted by technology and should be rooted in their communities. Our distributed research institute allows us to remain embedded in our communities in the U.S. and globally to include a greater diversity of perspectives and lived experiences.Well-BeingHealthy, thriving researchers ~ As researchers ourselves, we understand that the current environments in which we conduct this work do not prioritize our well-being. We value the commitments required to produce strong research and are committed to being a place where researchers do not have to choose between their work and their health.ComprehensivenessComprehensive, principled processes: We believe that groundbreaking research happens when researchers have the space to thoroughly conduct their work. We value deliberate, comprehensive processes that lead to quality findings.ProactivityProactive, pragmatic research: We believe that artificial intelligence can be a productive, inclusive technology that benefits our communities, rather than work against them. However, we also believe that AI is not always the solution and should not be treated as an inevitability.PragmatismOur goal is to be proactive about this technology and identify ways to use it to people’s benefit where possible, caution against potential harms and block it when it creates more harm than good.AI ResearchProduce interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AI) research_445ba122-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea00Research Philosophy ~ The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) produces interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.Goals, Risks & HarmsAnalyze the end goal and potential risks and harms of AI research from the start_445ba244-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea001Instead of constantly working to mitigate the harms of AI research performed by dominant groups without an analysis of potential risks and harms, we encourage a research process that analyzes its end goal and potential risks and harms from the start.Researchers & CommunitiesEnsure that researchers from many different backgrounds can participate while embedded in their communities_445ba366-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea002Our center is distributed to ensure that researchers from many different backgrounds can participate while embedded in their communities.CommunicationCommunicate our work in forms that are accessible and useful to members of impacted communities_445ba492-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea003Finally, we aim to communicate our work in forms that are accessible and useful to members of impacted communities, rather than purely based on research papers accessible to a select few.IncentivesIncentivize researchers to take their time and maximize the impact of their work_445ba5b4-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004AI ResearchersTo perform long term community based and interdisciplinary research rather than the current trend of constantly rushing to publish work every few months, we hope to incentivize researchers to take their time and maximize the impact of their work. While there are specific research directions we are interested in such as,Low ResourcesDevelop AI for low resource settings_445ba6e0-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004.1Language TechSupport language technology serving marginalized communities_445ba80c-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004.2Marginalized CommunitiesSocial MediaCoordinate social media activity_445ba938-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004.3DataConduct data related work_445baa82-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004.4Testing & DocumentationFacilitat robustness testing and documentation_445bac58-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004.5IdeationSupporting ideas initiated by members of the DAIR community_445bad8e-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea004.6DAIR Communitywe strongly believe in a bottoms up approach to research, supporting ideas initiated by members of the DAIR community, rather than a purely top down direction dictated by a few.ProjectsShow examples of work that DAIR researchers have produced with external collaborators_445baec4-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea005These projects show examples of work that DAIR researchers have produced with external collaborators, starting prior to the launch of DAIR and continuing on the themes with followup work. Stay tuned for additional projects.Spatial ApartheidStudy the evolution of spatial apartheid in South Africa_445bb018-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea005.1Raesetje SefalaRaesetje Sefala won the "Most Rigorous Researcher" IndabaX South Africa roadshow award for this work.South AfricaThe Legacy of Spatial Apartheid, Raesetje Sefala et al. ~ Aerial images of neighborhoods in South Africa show the clear legacy of Apartheid, a former policy of political and economic discrimination against non-European groups, with completely segregated neighborhoods of townships next to gated wealthy areas. This paper introduces a dataset to study the evolution of spatial apartheid in South Africa. Stay tuned for our dataset release, additional visualizations and followup work.Dataset DocumentationDocument the motivation, composition, collection process, and recommended uses of datasets_445bb14e-d3ca-11ed-808a-69050183ea005.2Timnit GebruTesting and Documentation, Timnit Gebru et al. ~ Dr. Gebru has been involved in various works related to documentation of datasets and trained models. In this December 2021 issue of Communications of the ACM, Dr. Gebru and her co-authors propose that every dataset be accompanied with a datasheet that documents its motivation, composition, collection process, recommended uses, and so on. ^^ Stay tuned for more work on robustness testing and documentation of AI systems and the datasets they are trained/tested on.2021-12-022023-04-05https://www.dair-institute.org/aboutOwenAmburOwen.Ambur@verizon.net