No AI about us, without us:  Engaging Disability Communities in Meaningful Data Work to Improve AI Models

AI image generation is being rapidly adopted, despite the popular and academic literature demonstrating that its representation of people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups, is at best poor, and often offensive. As visual media shapes public perceptions and hence access to education and employment, disability communities are calling for more influence over their representation in these models. In this talk, I will discuss the design and evaluation of the Community Library Creator, which enables communities to define ‘good’ representation and embody that in a diverse, structured dataset that can be used for pre-training large image generation models.

Speaker’s Bio
I am a Sr Principal Research Manager in Equitable AI at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I co-lead the Teachable AI Experience team (TAI X) which aims to innovate new human-AI interactions that bring us to a more inclusive society. I believe strongly that we must innovate the machine learning techniques that we use in conjunction with designing new types of experiences. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from University of Cambridge (opens in new tab) and an undergraduate degree in Ethnomusicology from Barnard College, Columbia University(opens in new tab). I currently live with my family in Massachusetts.

How to Get There
Public transportation: Take the Red Line Kendal Square. Upon arrival to 1 Memorial Drive, show your ID at the desk and take the elevators to Floor M.