Analysis on the Development of Women in the Field of Artificial Intelligence

One thing we can say for a moment is that it will not change the problem of gender discrimination in the field of computer science for decades or all related issues. According to a variety of recent reports, in large technology companies such as Google and Facebook, women still account for only 20% of the total number of engineers, while the proportion of Uber is even lower. But, for example, a sexual harassment in a Silicon Valley company, and a Google engineer sent a memo to a colleague stating that women are not biologically good at program compilation, and that both of them were horrible for female engineers in 2017. After the incident, we actually have reason to believe that things need to change this in 2018, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence.

At first glance, artificial intelligence seems to be the least likely scenario area for women to be friendly. Hanna Wallach, a researcher at Artificial Intelligence and one of the founders of the Symposium on Women in Machine Learning, said that in the field of machine learning, only 13.5% of female engineers are women. In the #MeToo campaign, artificial intelligence researchers also conducted and investigated sexual harassment allegations, as well as complaints about inappropriate jokes about gender around a major industry meeting around NIPS.

However, three new artificial intelligence policies and advocacy groups have emerged recently, with a large number of industrial support and lofty goals of changing artificial intelligence design and implementation methods, and are mainly aimed at women's rights protection.

The artificial intelligence organization is made up of technology giants such as Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, who hired Terah Lyons as executive director. Lyons was a policy advisor to the US CTO of the White House Office of Technology Policy (OSTP), where she was one of the leaders of the Obama administration's in-depth study of artificial intelligence to change the world's potential.

The main goal of the artificial intelligence organization is to “enhance public understanding of artificial intelligence technology (AI) and develop best practice plans for challenges and opportunities in this area”. Funded by some of the world's largest technology companies, it helps to develop policies at the federal level and think about the future of artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, New York University research firm AI Now was officially announced this fall by Kate Crawford, Principal Investigator of Microsoft Research, and Meredith Whittaker, founder of Google Open Research. Established. One of the team's main tasks is to ensure that engineers who produce artificial intelligence algorithms work closely with people who are using artificial intelligence. For example, in the case of applying for medical needs, they want to ensure that doctors are part of their research. This kind of work will help guide artificial intelligence to solve the real needs of life, not just the problems that computer programmers think needs to be solved.

To help increase the number of women receiving artificial intelligence training, we have a non-profit organization, AI4ALL, a summer program at Princeton University where professors assign different tasks to different high school students. This organization was created by computer vision expert Olga Russakovsky in 2016 (see "35 Innovators under 35" for details) and related parties. Moreover, AI4ALL was funded by Melinda Gates this year and will expand to four universities in 2018. The main purpose of the AI4ALL is to help women, and a small number of low-income students to learn more about artificial intelligence.

When talking about the MIT Technology Review, Russakovsky pointed out that AI4ALL does not rely on women's main operations, and its board of directors is 50% male.

She said: "In the same industry, our organization is 'heterogeneous'."

For Russakovsky, she cares a lot about whether women in 2018 will be treated better in the field of artificial intelligence. After all, non-profit organizations are one thing, but more power is still concentrated in the hands of some white men living in the San Francisco area.

But she saw hope in the summer of AI4ALL. "I don't know if 2018 will be completely improved, but this transformation has already begun," Russakovsky said. "I believe that these changes will happen after the next wave of students we have trained."