Keynotes
Margaret Mitchell, researcher and Chief Ethics Scientist, Hugging Face
Title
Curating Minds: The Ethics of Engineering Recommendations that Reshape Reality
Abstract
Recommender systems shape what people know about the world, and the societal benefits and harms of such a powerful technology are well-documented: Personalization on the one hand risks polarization on the other. Ease of access to relevant content is compromised by actors who are privileged to have first access to user attention at the expense of those with less money, resources, or connection to the company operating the recommendation system. Bias issues proliferate. Generative AI amplifies these dynamics, with the added complication of distorting our sense of what’s real and what’s not. In this talk, I will examine recommender system design as a space of ethical choices that give rise to these effects, charting how alternative value priorities can lead to recommender systems that expand human knowledge, agency, and opportunity without homogenizing and constricting social viewpoints.
Biography
Margaret Mitchell is a machine learning researcher focused on ethics-informed AI development. She has published over 100 papers on natural language generation, computer vision, and AI ethics, and is recognized among TIME’s Most Influential People and Fortune’s Top Innovators. She currently serves as Chief Ethics Scientist at Hugging Face, and previously founded and co-led Google’s Ethical AI group. Before that, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research and a postdoc at Johns Hopkins. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Aberdeen and a Master’s in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington. She is best known for pioneering “Model Cards” for ML model reporting, developing “Seeing AI” for blind and low-vision individuals, and her work on mitigating unwanted AI biases. She likes gardening, dogs, and cats.
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