Timnit Gebru emigrated to the US from Ethiopia, earned a PhD, and become an artificial-intelligence expert at Apple and Google.

Throughout her education and her career, she’s repeatedly found herself the only woman, or the only Black woman, or the only African in the classroom, on the job, at conferences, and in positions of authority. She’s dedicated to changing all that.

At Google, she co-wrote a report describing how the company’s search-engine algorithms are biased against all women and against people of color. Google told her to withdraw or revise the report. When she refused repeatedly and adamantly, she was fired.

“AI needs to be brought back down to earth,” says Gebru. “... When AI research, development, and deployment is rooted in people and communities from the start, we can get in front of these harms and create a future that values equity and humanity.”

Gebru has launched the DAIR Institute, an independent, nonprofit research group that shows the world how to do AI right.