Timnit Gebru educated at Stanford University
Early life and education
Gebru was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her father, an electrical engineer with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), died when she was five years old, and she was raised by her mother, an economist. Both her parents are from Eritrea. When Gebru was 15, during the Eritrean–Ethiopian War, she fled Ethiopia after some of her family was deported to Eritrea and compelled to fight in the war. She was initially denied a U.S. visa and briefly lived in Ireland, but she eventually received political asylum in the U.S., an experience she said was "miserable." Gebru settled in Somerville, Massachusetts, to attend high school, where she says she immediately started to experience racially based discrimination, with some teachers refusing to allow her to take certain Advanced Placement courses, despite being a high-achiever.After completing high school, an encounter with the police set Gebru on a course toward a focus on ethics in technology. A friend of hers, a Black woman, was assaulted in a bar, and Gebru called the police to report it. She says that instead of filing the assault report, her friend was arrested and remanded to a cell. Gebru called it a pivotal moment and a "blatant example of systemic racism."In 2001, Gebru was accepted at Stanford University. There she earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering and her PhD in computer vision in 2017. Gebru was advised during her PhD program by Fei-Fei Li.During the 2008 United States presidential election, Gebru canvassed in support of Barack Obama.Gebru presented her doctoral research at the 2017 LDV Capital Vision Summit competition, where computer vision scientists present their work to members of industry and venture capitalists. Gebru won the competition, starting a series of collaborations with other entrepreneurs and investors.Both during her PhD program in 2016 and in 2018, Gebru returned to Ethiopia with Jelani Nelson's programming campaign AddisCoder.While working on her PhD, Gebru authored a paper that was never published about her concern over the future of AI. She wrote of the dangers of the lack of diversity in the field, centered on her experiences with the police and on a ProPublica investigation into predictive policing, which revealed a projection of human biases in machine learning. In the paper, she scathed the "boy's club culture," reflecting on her experiences at conference gatherings of drunken male attendees sexually harassing her, and criticized the hero worship of the field's celebrities.
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