Hugging Face is an open-source AI platform for people to share and collaborate on AI models.

Margaret Mitchell, the former head of Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Ethical AI research group, will join AI startup Hugging Face where she will develop tools to help companies eliminate bias from their AI algorithms. Initially suspended in January, Mitchell was fired by Google February ostensibly because of a paper she co-wrote that was critical of the company. (Bloomberg)

However, Mitchell had been publicly vocal and critical of how Google treated her colleague and AI researcher Timnit Gebru, as well as the circumstances surrounding the latter’s departure from the company. Gebru has claimed that Google sacked her for her protests regarding its policy surrounding minority hiring and its handling of bias in AI developments.

Mitchell at HuggingFace

Hugging Face is an open-source community platform for AI projects that is used by more than 5,000 organizations including megacorporations such as Google, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). Users can build, train and deploy AI algorithms powered by the reference open-source in natural language processing.

At Hugging Face Mitchell’s remit would be to develop tools that can detect and remove bias from the basic learning data that are used to train AI algorithms. Data that is defective or incomplete can lead AI software to deliver faulty or biased results, with serious implications. For example, an AI model may unreasonably reject loan applications by a minority community.

At Google, Mitchell had developed a tool called Model Cards that evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of an AI algorithm.

Hugging Face has long been recommending Mitchell’s tool to users on its platform.

In a Twitter post Mitchell said:

“I’m joining Hugging Face 🤗. It’s a community creating transparent AI models that are now powering both private and public AI, so exactly where I should be to move AI forward from its very foundations. =)”

Related Story:  After Gebru, Google Terminates Another AI Researcher

Image Credit: Margaret Mitchell Twitter