Research philosophy

Our work aims to do two things: Mitigate/disrupt/eliminate/slow down harms caused by AI technology, and cultivate spaces to accelerate imagination and creation of new technologies and tools to build a better future.

Projects

Data for Change

We use quantitative and qualitative methodologies to equip historically marginalized groups with data to advocate for change. See below for some of our projects.

Impacts of spatial apartheid

Raesetje Sefala, Dylan Baker, Nyalleng Moorosi, Timnit Gebru

Analyzing the impacts of South African apartheid using computer vision techniques and satellite imagery. Read our NeurIPS paper and this MIT Tech Review article, and check out our dataset and visualizations.

Figure 4 from a paper showing a colorful bar graphs of clusters, events articles and participants by a number of topics including police violence, affirmative action and other political issues.

Anti-racist protests

Alex Hanna, Nathan Kim

Analyzing the history of Black protests in the US and Canada using machine learning methods. Read our papers on Sociological Science and Mobilization to learn more.

An image by Jamillah Knowles & Reset.Tech Australia / Better Images of AI / People with phones / CC-BY 4.0 It shows a bunch of people walking, standing in a wheel chair, all looking at their phones. The image is brown in color.

Social media harms

Meron Estefanos, Asmelash Teka, Dylan Baker, Alex Hanna, Timnit Gebru, Nuredin Ali

Creating natural language processing tools, and using qualitative methods to analyze the impacts of social media platforms on neglected countries and languages (more soon). Read Dylan's op-ed in Tech Policy Press and his guide to social media data collection for researchers.

A sketch of a labeling interface, with a black and white sketch of a man in a rectangular window.

Data workers' inquiry

Adio-Adet Dinika, Milagros Miceli, Krystal Kauffman

Centering the experiences of data workers in machine learning by using the Workers' Inquiry approach to uncover opportunities for collaborative knowledge exchange and collective organizing. Go to https://data-workers.org to find zines, reports, documentaries, podcasts and more created by 16 data workers from 4 continents.

Screenshot of a slide with a green background. Surveillance Wage Theft written on the side, and with text 1) Stand-Up Meetings $2,500-$2,600 2. Mentor App $1,875-$7,800, 3. AI Powered Cameras

Wage theft calculator

Adrienne Williams, Sandra Barcenas Fuerte, Ash Rosas, Alex Hanna,

Creating a wage-theft calculator to estimate how much workers are owed in lost wages that are stolen with the assistance of surveillance technologies. Watch Adrienne's talk.

Latest publications

We publish interdisciplinary work uncovering and mitigating the harms of current AI systems, and research, tools and frameworks for the technological future we should build instead.

Talks and podcasts

A curated set of educational talks and interviews on topics ranging from algorithmic bias to participatory research.