Sun, Dec 16, 2018 page15

• Artificial intelligence’s rise exposes glaring gender gap in tech industry

  • By Matt O’Brien / AP
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  The challenges of making the technology industry a more welcoming place for women are numerous, especially in the booming field of artificial intelligence (AI).

  To get a sense of just how monumental a task the tech community faces, look no further than the marquee gathering for AI’s top scientists. Preparations for this year’s event drew controversy not only because there were not enough female speakers or study authors.

  The biggest debate was over the conference’s name.

  The annual Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems, formerly known as NIPS, had become a punchline symbol about just how bad the gender imbalance is for artificial intelligence.

  Thousands of AI researchers last week convened in Montreal under a slightly tweaked banner — NeurIPS — but with many of the same problems still under the surface.

  AI’s challenge reflects a broader lack of diversity in the tech industry. At major tech companies, women account for 20 percent or fewer of the engineering and computing roles.

  By some accounts, AI’s gender imbalance is even worse: One estimate by start-up incubator Element AI shows women making up just 13 percent of the AI workforce in the US.

  The challenge has repercussions far beyond career recruitment. Artificial intelligence and a self-training discipline known as machine learning can mimic the biases of their human creators.

  “The more diversity we have in machine learning, the better job we will do in creating products that don’t discriminate,” said Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft Corp researcher who is a senior program chairwoman of the conference and cofounder of an associated event for women in machine learning.

  AI systems look for patterns in huge troves of data — such as what we say to our voice assistants or what images we post on social media. These systems can share the same gender or racial prejudices found there.

  Such misfires have increasingly attracted attention. A rogue Microsoft chatbot spouted sexist and racist remarks. A Google app to match selfies to famous works of mostly Western art lumped many non-whites into the same exoticized figures.

  While a growing number of researchers and product designers are devoting attention to solving these problems, Wallach said it did not help to have an “off-putting” name marring an important gathering for sharing new research and recruiting new people.

  The conference dates back to 1986 and the name did not raise as many eyebrows for its first few decades, especially with even fewer women working in tech.

  However, as the nerdy summit’s headcount and its public reputation exploded in the past few years, the nickname became increasingly embarrassing.

  Critics said it added to a hostile environment that for some women also included unwelcome advances and other forms of harassment.

  Start-up booths hawked T-shirts and other promotional freebies with sexist slogans riffing off the acronym.

  “This name change has opened up so many of the issues that women and minorities face in tech,” said long-time conference attendee Animashree Anandkumar, who directs machine learning research at chipmaker Nvidia Corp.

  Conference leaders this year acknowledged “incidents of insensitivity at past conferences” and issued stricter rules banning harassment, bullying and sexualized clothing and activities.

  However, they resisted changing the name as recently as October, when they released a survey of more than 2,000 attendees — mostly men — that found most were okay with it.

  That led Anandkumar to start a Twitter hashtag to step up the pressure.

  Google AI chief Jeff Dean weighed in, tweeting that “enough people are made to feel uncomfortable by the current name.”

  The conference board relented and announced on Nov. 16 that the new acronym would be NeurIPS.

  At the same time, it offered more amenities — such as childcare — and more panels devoted to addressing bias and inclusion — both in the industry and the technology it creates.

  The changes prompted Anandkumar to tweet that she experienced a “feeling of belonging” for the first time in years.

  She said she hopes it signals a “return of civility” to the field.
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