He applied for the award, he said, “because of my feeling at the time that Google was building a really strong and potentially industry-leading ethical AI team.”
At the time, Gebru said the Google AI leadership told her to remove the article from consideration for presentation at a conference or to remove her name from it. Google said it accepted Gebru’s resignation due to a list of demands that she had e-mailed and that needed to be met in order for her to continue working at the company.
All of this came into focus for Stark on Wednesday, March 10, when Google sent him a note of congratulations, offering him $ 60,000 for his proposal for a research project that would examine how companies are launching AI that is used to detect emotions. Stark said he immediately felt he needed to reject the award to show his support for Gebru and Mitchell, as well as those who still remain on Google’s AI ethics team.
“My first thought was, ‘I have to turn down the volume,'” Stark told CNN Business.
“In good conscience, I can no longer accept financing 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 had previously received $ 30,000 from Google in 2018 for a research project.
The money involved is of little importance to Google. But the escalating consequences of Google’s tensions with its AI ethics team now pose a risk to the company reputation and stature in the AI community. This is crucial as Google struggles for talent – such as company employees and names linked to it in the academic community.
“I think this is broader than the company itself imagines,” said Stark.
Declining in solidarity
Despite his initial inclination, Stark did not immediately decline the Google award. He told colleagues about what he planned to do – “People supported any decision I made,” he said – before sending his response to Google the following Friday. He thanked the company for the “vote of confidence” in his research, but wrote that he was “declining this award in solidarity with Drs. Gebru and Mitchell, their teammates and all those who went through similar situations,” according to e- mails viewed by CNN Business.
“I look forward to the possibility of collaborating again with Google Research, as the organization and its leaders reflected on their decision in this case, addressed the damage they caused and committed, by word and deed, to promoting critical research and products that support equity and justice, “wrote Stark.
Gebru said he liked Stark’s action.
“It’s a big deal for someone to refuse to sponsor Google,” she told CNN Business. “Especially someone who is at the beginning of his career.”
A Google spokesman said that, in the past 15 years, the company has provided more than 6,500 academic and research grants to people outside of Google. Stark is the first person to refuse one, according to the spokesman.
“It was a real fiasco the way they were treated”
However, Stark’s decision is just the latest show of solidarity with Gebru and Mitchell.
“It was a real fiasco the way [Gebru and Mitchell] were treated. No one has apologized to them yet, “she told CNN Business in a recent interview.” I don’t want to interact with companies that behave that way in relation to the main researchers. ”
Google’s efforts to expand the boundaries of AI
Google is aware that its reputation as a research institution has been damaged in recent months, and the company said it plans to fix it. At a recent Google City Hall meeting, which Reuters reported for the first time and CNN Business also obtained audio, the company described the changes it is making to its internal research and publishing practices.
“I think the way to regain confidence is to continue to publish cutting-edge work in many, many areas, including pushing the boundaries on topics related to responsible AI, publishing things that are deeply interesting to the research community, I think it’s one of the best ways to continue to be a leader in the research field, “said Jeff Dean, head of AI at Google. He was responding to a question from an employee about outside researchers, saying that they will read Google articles “with more skepticism now”.
Gebru hopes that, like the FAccT, more conferences will reevaluate his relations with the technology companies’ research labs. Historically, much of the AI development and study work has been done in academic settings. But as companies discover more and more commercial uses for technology, the lines between the academic and corporate worlds become blurred. Google is just one of many technology companies that has a major influence on academic conferences that publish many of their research papers; her employees participate in conference panels and she sponsors numerous conferences each year, sometimes worth tens of thousands of dollars.
For example, Google and some subsidiaries of its parent company, Alphabet, were listed as “platinum” and $ 10,000 “gold” sponsors at the International Machine Learning Conference, or ICML, and the Information Processing Systems Conference Neural, or NeurIPS, in 2020 – both major AI conferences. And some of the company’s employees participate in its organizing committees.
ICML President John Langford said the conference is “currently open to sponsorship” by Google for its 2021 conference, scheduled for July.
“There is a lot of discussion going on 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 that the conference has not yet made its annual call for sponsorships, but that requests “will be evaluated according to a set of selection guidelines established by this year’s sponsorship presidents”; NeurIPS is scheduled for December.
For Stark and others in the academic research community, however, their criteria for accepting Google funds have already changed.
“Extra research money would be great,” said Stark. “But it was something I felt I just couldn’t take.”