Margaret Mitchell (scientist)

Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models,[2] as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use.[3]

Margaret Mitchell
Mitchell (2022)
Born
United States
Other namesShmargaret Shmitchell[1]
Alma materUniversity of Aberdeen (PhD in Computer Science)
University of Washington (MSc in Computational Linguistics)
Known forAlgorithmic bias
Fairness in Machine Learning
Computer Vision
Natural Language Processing
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsGoogle
Microsoft Research
Johns Hopkins University
ThesisGenerating Reference to Visible Objects (2012)
WebsitePersonal website

Education

Mitchell obtained a bachelor's degree in linguistics from Reed College, Portland, Oregon, in 2005. After having worked as a research assistant at the OGI School of Science and Engineering for two years, she subsequently obtained a Master's in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington in 2009. She enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Aberdeen, where she wrote a doctoral thesis on the topic of Generating Reference to Visible Objects,[4] graduating in 2013.

Career and research

Mitchell is most well known for her work on fairness in machine learning and methods for mitigating algorithmic bias. This includes her work on introducing the concept of 'Model Cards' for more transparent model reporting,[3] and methods for debiasing machine learning models using adversarial learning.[2] Margaret Mitchell created the framework for recognizing and avoiding biases by testing with a variable for the group of interest, predictor and an adversary.[5]

In 2012, Mitchell joined the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University as a postdoctoral researcher, before taking up a position at Microsoft Research in 2013.[6] At Microsoft, Mitchell was the research lead of the Seeing AI project, an app that offers support for the visually impaired by narrating texts and images.[7]

In November 2016, she became a senior research scientist at Google Research and Machine intelligence. While at Google, she founded and co-led the Ethical Artificial Intelligence team together with Timnit Gebru. In May 2018, she represented Google in the Partnership on AI.

In February 2018, she gave a TED talk on 'How we can build AI to help humans, not hurt us'.[8]

In January 2021, after Timnit Gebru's departure from Google, Mitchell reportedly used a script to search through her corporate account and download emails that allegedly documented discriminatory incidents involving Gebru. Mitchell's corporate account was then locked by an automated system. When the media covered the story, Google claimed that she "exfiltrated thousands of files and shared them with multiple external accounts".[9][10][11] After a five-week investigation, Mitchell was fired.[12][13][14] Prior to her dismissal, Mitchell had been a vocal advocate for diversity at Google, and had voiced concerns about research censorship at the company.[15][9]

In late 2021, she joined AI start-up Hugging Face.[16]

Leadership

Mitchell was a co-founder of Widening NLP, group seeking to increase the proportion of women and minorities working in natural language processing,[17] and a special interest group within the Association for Computational Linguistics.

References
  1. Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Shmitchell, Shmargaret (2021-03-01). "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots". Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. FAccT '21. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 610–623. doi:10.1145/3442188.3445922. ISBN 978-1-4503-8309-7. S2CID 232040593.
  2. Hu Zhang, Brian; Lemoine, Blake; Mitchell, Margaret (2018-12-01). "Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning". Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. pp. 220–229. doi:10.1145/3278721.3278779.
  3. Mitchell, Margaret; Wu, Simone; Zaldivar, Andrew; Barnes, Parker; Vasserman, Lucy; Hutchinson, Ben; Spitzer, Elena; Raji, Inioluwa Deborah; Gebru, Timnit (2019-01-29). "Model Cards for Model Reporting". Proceedings of the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. arXiv:1810.03993. doi:10.1145/3287560.3287596.
  4. Mitchell, Margaret (2013). Generating Reference to Visible Objects (PDF) (PhD). University of Aberdeen.
  5. Zhang, Brian Hu; Lemoine, Blake; Mitchell, Margaret (2018-12-27). "Mitigating Unwanted Biases with Adversarial Learning". Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. Aies '18. New Orleans LA USA: ACM. pp. 335–340. arXiv:1801.07593. doi:10.1145/3278721.3278779. ISBN 978-1-4503-6012-8. S2CID 9424845.
  6. Mitchell, Margaret (February 14, 2017). "Margaret Mitchell (Google Research) "Algorithmic Bias in Artificial Intelligence: The Seen and Unseen Factors Influencing Machine Perception of Images and Language"". John Hopkins. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
  7. "Seeing AI in New Languages". Microsoft. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
  8. "Margaret Mitchell's TED talk". TED. February 2018. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
  9. Murphy, Margi (20 February 2021). "Google sacks second ethical AI researcher amid censorship storm". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved April 2, 2023.
  10. Fried, Ina (2021-01-20). "Scoop: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist". Axios. Retrieved 2023-04-02.
  11. Simonite, Tom. "What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2023-04-02.
  12. "Google fires Margaret Mitchell, another top researcher on its AI ethics team". The Guardian. February 20, 2021. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
  13. "Margaret Mitchell: Google fires AI ethics founder". BBC. February 20, 2021. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
  14. "Google fires Ethical AI lead Margaret Mitchell". VentureBeat. February 20, 2021. Retrieved February 20, 2021.
  15. Osborne, Charlie. "Google fires top ethical AI expert Margaret Mitchell". ZDNet. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
  16. "Fired from Google After Critical Work, AI Researcher Mitchell to Join Startup". Bloomberg.com. 24 August 2021.
  17. Johnson, Khari. "Black and Queer AI Groups Say They'll Spurn Google Funding". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2023-04-02.
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