Abeba Birhane

Senior Fellow, Trustworthy AI

2022-2023

Ireland

Dr. Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist researching human behavior, social systems, and responsible and ethical artificial intelligence (AI). Her interdisciplinary research explores broad themes in cognitive science, AI, complexity science, and theories of decoloniality. More specifically, Dr. Birhane examines the challenges and pitfalls of computational models (and datasets) from a conceptual, empirical, and critical perspective.

Fellowship Project

Abeba conducted a comparative audit of datasets used by large generative models, specifically LAION-400M and LAION-2B-en. She discovered the presence of hateful content within these datasets, which contributed to the associated models producing societal biases and negative stereotypes. Abeba also assessed saliency cropping algorithms, the AI tool that automatically crops photos in social media feeds. This work was inspired by a Twitter user who experimented with the algorithm, witnessing it crop a Black man out of a photo and prioritize a white man. To investigate further, Abeba and her collaborators examined the cropping tools used by Twitter, Apple, and Google. She and her collaborators discovered the cropping tools consistently favored white individuals over Black individuals. In addition, they observed a tendency to objectify women by emphasizing their bodies rather than their faces, reflecting the "male gaze."