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Bangladeshi-origin Rumman Chowdhury among Times 100 most influential people in AI
- Leading voice in applied algorithmic ethics
- Has had involvement in finding AI vulnerabilities
- Co-organized event for hackers in Las Vegas
- Served as Twitter’s machine-learning ethics team
Rumman Chowdhury. Photo: Collected
Tribune Desk
Publish : 08 Sep 2023, 03:52 PMUpdate : 08 Sep 2023, 03:52 PM
Bangladeshi-origin data scientist Rumman Chowdhury, CEO and co-founder of Humane Intelligence, has been listed in TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, a prestigious recognition that honours her significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.
With a career that intersects data science and social science, Dr Rumman Chowdhury has been a leading voice in applied algorithmic ethics, a proliferating field that grapples with the ethical implications of AI and machine learning technologies.
She has had important involvement in AI by finding several vulnerabilities, including one where a chatbot revealed a credit card number that it had been told to keep secret.
In early August, some 4,000 hackers gathered in Las Vegas to break chatbots from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Hackers who were able to persuade the AIs to act in ways that broke their own rules — giving the recipe for anthrax, say, or spewing racist screeds — were rewarded with points.
The event was co-organized by Rumman Chowdhury, an AI ethicist. Her organization, Humane Intelligence, is a non-profit that specializes in this so-called red teaming of AI systems.
The event underscored the urgency of her work.
Until Elon Musk fired her, she was the head of Twitter’s machine-learning ethics team, where she led research that found the company’s AI algorithms disproportionately boosted right-wing news sources during the 2020 US elections.
After ChatGPT was released, she asked the bot for information about her. It reported that she was a social media influencer with a large collection of shoes. “It’s not just that it was factually incorrect,” Rumman said, adding: “It was very gendered.”
Those in the TIME100 AI span 18-year-old Sneha Revanur, who recently met with the Biden administration as part of her work leading Encode Justice, a youth-led movement organizing for ethical AI, to 76-year-old Geoffrey Hinton, who left his position at Google this spring to speak about the dangers of the technology he helped bring into existence.
This group of 100 individuals is in many ways a map of the relationships and power centres driving the development of AI. 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.
Hope she opens up a company in Bangladesh to help us in our endeavour to become a significant IT power in the world.
