27-year-old Nigerian researcher makes Time’s 100 most influential people in AI

Nigeria’s Inioluwa Raji has been named in the inaugural Time Magazine’s 100 list of most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI).

The magazine, on Thursday, said this group of 100 individuals is, in many ways, a map of the relationships and power centres driving the development of AI.

The media firm said they are rivals and regulators, scientists and artists, advocates and executives — the competing and cooperating humans whose insights, desires, and flaws will shape the direction of an increasingly influential technology.

Raji, a fellow with the Mozilla Foundation (a global nonprofit focused on internet protection), was listed among the ‘thinkers’ category for inquisitiveness and passion for helping AI companies.

According to the report, the 27-year-old Raji was an intern at the machine-learning company, Clarifai, where she had an “alarming realisation”.

While helping the startup train a content-moderation model intended to filter out explicit images, she noticed that the model was disproportionately flagging content containing people of colour that was not explicit.

The AI enthusiast had raised the issue as the programme was “filtering the world to be whiter than it actually is”.

Time Magazine said Raji’s discovery also prompted a shift in her focus away from the startup world and toward AI research, where she began to focus on how AI companies could ensure that their models do not cause undue harm.

She intends to better understand and challenge products before they are implemented at broader scales.

“As a default, a lot of the models that we developed had (data) where a pornographic image that was supposed to represent the (explicit) content was more diverse than the stock images that were supposed to represent safe content,” she said in an interview with Time.

“If I would say we need more diverse data, the response I got was, ‘it’s hard enough to get any data, why would we be thinking about making more complex choices?’

“It became clear to me that this is really not something that people in the field are even aware is a problem to the extent that it is.”

Speaking on regulations and long-term effect and measures, Raji said it is up to developers to provide transparent evaluations of their products and the harms it poses.

“A company’s product is evaluated on a benchmark that tells a very nice, clean story. They’re not mandated to protect their users on anything from privacy to communicating honestly about how well the system will work for that user,” she added.

Raji, since her discovery, has worked with Google’s Ethical AI team to introduce a more holistic internal assessment process for artificial intelligence systems.

She has also collaborated with the Algorithmic Justice League to create strategies for “external auditing” on its ‘Gender Shades’ audit project, Microsoft, and Face++.