Timnit Gebru biography: 13 things about Eritrean-Ethiopian AI researcher

Timnit Gebru is a Ethiopian computer scientist and a researcher on ethics and the use of artificial intelligence (AI). She is of Eritrean descent.

Having worked on racial bias in technology for years, Gebru criticized systems that fail to recognize African-American faces. While on vacation during the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, she was terminated from her position as staff research scientist and co-lead of ethical AI team at Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States.

Gebru is an alumna of Stanford University in Stanford, California. Here are 13 more things about her:

1. She was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1983. She is the youngest among three daughters.
2. Her two older sisters are electrical engineers like their father, who died in 1988.
3. Both of her parents are from Eritrea, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. She traveled to Ireland to escape potential forced deportation to Eritrea by the Ethiopian government.
4. In 1999, she moved from Ethiopia to the U.S. Her two older sisters have been living in the U.S. and their mother moved there months before she did.
5. She completed her high school education in Massachusetts, USA.
6. From June 2004 to September 2004, she served as an audio hardware intern at Apple in Cupertino, California.
7. She worked for Apple as an audio systems engineer from July 2005 to September 2007 and as an audio software and hardware engineer from June 2007 to August 2011.
8. In 2008, she earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She served as a graduate research assistant there from September 2010 to June 2011. From the same university, she earned her masters degree in electrical engineering in 2010 and her PhD in electrical engineering in 2015. While she was still a PhD student, she co-founded Black in AI with Rediet Abebe.
9. In September 2011, she co-founded MotionThink, which is based in Palo Alto, California.
10. From June 2012 to August 2012, she attended Hacker School in New York, New York, USA. She honed her programming skills by working on a variety of open source projects in Objective C, python, C++, Ruby on Rails and Javascript.
11. In 2016, she attended an AI research conference attended by an estimated 8,500 people. She noticed that out of the attendees, only six were African-American and among them, she was the only female.
12. In 2018, she finished her post-doctoral research in the Fairness Transparency Accountability and Ethics (FATE) in AI group at Microsoft Research in New York City. In the same year, she and Joy Buolamwini co-authored a paper titled “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification.”
13. She was one of the speakers at the inaugural Fast Company Innovation Festival, which was held from October 5-9, 2020.