Abeba Birhane is a cognitive scientist, currently a Senior Advisor in AI Accountability at Mozilla Foundation and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin (working with Trinity’s Complex Software Lab). 

Abeba’s research explores the challenges and pitfalls of automating human behaviour through critical examination of existing models and audits of large scale datasets used for training state-of-the-art AI models – work that she focused on in a recent perspective in leading international journal Science, and for which she was recently featured in Wired UK. You can read more about this on our News & Events pages. 

 Speaking about being named to the TIME100 AI list, Professor Birhane said: “I am extremely thrilled to be included on the list among some of the most inspiring scholars whose work I greatly admire.

“The current AI landscape, especially developments around generative AI, is simply unpredictable. There is currently so much noise which makes deciphering hype from reality difficult. One current interesting development is the emergence of numerous lawsuits around data harvesting practices. Such developments, if persistent, could be key to responsible and accountable data creation, curation and management practices.” 

The TIME100 AI list features leaders, policymakers, artists and entrepreneurs across a variety of fields and from countries around the world. See the full list on the TIME website.