He entered the award, he said, “because I felt at the time that Google was building a very strong, potentially leading ethical AI team.”
At the time, Gebru said Google AI leadership had told her not to consider the paper for presentation at a conference or to remove her name from it. Google said it accepted Gebru’s resignation due to a list of requirements she emailed that had to be met before she could continue working at the company.
All of this came into strong focus for Stark on Wednesday, March 10, when Google sent him a letter of congratulation offering him $ 60,000 for his proposal for a research project that would look at how companies are rolling out AI used to detect emotions. Stark said he immediately felt he had to decline the award to show his support for Gebru and Mitchell, as well as those who are still part of the ethical AI team at Google.
“My first thought was, ‘I have to turn it down,'” Stark told CNN Business.
“In good conscience, I cannot accept funding from a company that treats its employees this way,” Vijay Chidambaram, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies storage systems, told CNN Business. Chidambaram previously received $ 30,000 from Google for a research project in 2018.
The money involved has little effect on Google. But the growing ramifications of Google’s tensions with its ethical AI team now pose a risk to the company reputation and status in the AI community. This is crucial because Google competes for talent, both as employees at the company and as names associated with it in the academic community.
“I think this is more widespread than even the company realizes,” said Stark.
Diminishing solidarity
Despite his initial inclination, Stark did not immediately turn down Google’s award. He spoke to colleagues about what he planned to do – “People supported every decision I made,” he said – before sending Google his answer the following Friday. He thanked the company for the “vote of confidence” in its research, but wrote that he “declined this award out of solidarity with Dr. Gebru and Mitchell, their teammates, and all those who have been in similar situations,” said emails. watched by CNN Business.
“I look forward to the opportunity to partner again with Google Research, as the organization and its leaders have reflected on their decision on this matter, addressed the damage they have caused, and committed in word and deed to promote scrutiny and products that support equality and justice, ”wrote Stark.
Gebru said she appreciated Stark’s move.
“It’s quite a deal for someone to turn down Google sponsorships,” she told CNN Business. “Especially someone who is still early in his career.”
A Google spokesperson said the company has provided more than 6,500 academic and research grants to people outside of Google in the past 15 years. Stark is the first to reject one, the spokesman said.
“It was a real fiasco as they were treated”
Still, Stark’s decision is just the latest show of solidarity with Gebru and Mitchell.
‘It was a real fiasco, by the way [Gebru and Mitchell] were treated. No one has even apologized yet, “she told CNN Business in a recent interview.” I don’t want to interact with companies that behave that way towards top researchers. ”
Google’s efforts to push boundaries in AI
Google is aware that its reputation as a research institution has been damaged in recent months and the company has said it plans to restore this. At a recent meeting at Google’s town hall, first reported by Reuters and from which CNN Business has also obtained audio, the company outlined changes it is making to its internal research and publishing practices.
“I think the way to regain trust is to keep publishing groundbreaking work in many, many areas, including pushing the boundaries of responsible AI related topics, publishing things that are very interesting to the public. research community. of the best ways to stay at the forefront of research, ”said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief of AI. He responded to an employee’s question about outside researchers, saying they will read Google papers “with more skepticism now.”
Gebru hopes that, like FAccT, more conferences will re-evaluate their relationships with technology companies’ research labs. Historically, much of the work in the development and study of AI has been carried out within academic settings. But as companies have found more and more commercial uses for the technology, the lines between academia and the corporate world have become blurred. Google is just one of many technology companies that exerts a great deal of influence over academic conferences that publish many of its researcher reports; its employees sit on conference boards and it sponsors numerous conferences every year, sometimes for tens of thousands of dollars.
For example, Google and some subsidiaries of its parent company, Alphabet, were listed as sponsors of $ 20,000 “platinum” and $ 10,000 “gold” at the International Conference on Machine Learning, or ICML and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, in 2020 – both major AI conferences. And some of the company’s employees are on their organizing committees.
ICML President John Langford said the conference is “currently open to sponsorship” by Google for the 2021 conference, scheduled for July.
“There has been quite a bit of debate about how ICML as a conference should encourage good machine learning culture and practices with future sponsorship policies as part of that discussion,” he added.
NeurIPS Executive Director Mary Ellen Perry said the conference has not yet launched its annual call for sponsorship, but requests “will be judged against a set of selection guidelines set by this year’s sponsor presidents”; NeurIPS is scheduled for December.
However, for Stark and others in the academic research community, their criteria for accepting money from Google have already changed.
“Additional research funding would be great,” said Stark. “But it was something I felt I just couldn’t handle.”