Resistance AI Workshop

Friday, Dec 11, 2020
Held virtually during the NeurIPS 2020 Conference

The goal of the Resistance AI Workshop is to examine how AI shifts power
and how we can build human/AI systems that shift power to the people.

Why we are hosting the Resistance AI Workshop

It has become increasingly clear in recent years that AI research, far from producing neutral tools, has been concentrating power in the hands of governments and companies and away from marginalized communities. Unfortunately, the NeurIPS Conference — one of the largest and most esteemed machine learning conferences in the world — has until now lacked a venue explicitly dedicated to understanding and addressing this concerning reality. As Black feminist scholar Angela Davis famously said, "Radical simply means grasping things at the root." Resistance AI exposes the root of the current reality: technology rearranges power. We believe that when we are engaged in Resistance AI, we can both resist AI that centralizes power in the hands of the few and we can dream up and build human/AI systems that put power in the hands of the people. This workshop will be a space for AI researchers and marginalized communities to discuss and reflect on AI-fueled inequity and co-create our dreams and tactics of how to work toward Resistance AI.

Join us!

Participation in the workshop requires registration for the NeurIPS conference. To make the workshop more accessible, we plan to waive workshop registration fees for as many people as possible who would not otherwise attend it. To be considered for a registration fee waiver please submit this form by Sunday, December 6. If you choose to register on your own, please be advised that registration for the conference closes Monday, December 7.

Workshop speakers (ordered alphabetically)

Rediet Abebe

Incoming Professor @Berkeley & co-founder of Mechanism Design for Social Good and Black in AI

Abeba Birhane

PhD Student in Cognitive Science @University College Dublin

Ashley Cordes

University of Utah,Chair of Culture and Education Committee of the Coquille Nation

Saadia Gabriel

PhD student in Computer Science @University of Washington

Timnit Gebru

Acclaimed Ethical AI Researcher & co-founder of Black in AI

Jason Edward Lewis

University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary @Concordia University

Oiwi Parker Jones

Research Fellow in Biology/AI @University of Oxford

Inioluwa Deborah Raji

Fellow @Mozilla

Jamelle Watson-Daniels

Director of Research @Data For Black Lives

and more TBA!

Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion, and Centering Communities at the Margins

We recognize that power in society is distributed unevenly and People of Color, Black, Indigenous, Womxn, Queer, Gender Non-Conforming, Poor, Disabled, and other communities are pushed to the margins.

Resistance AI centers these communities at the margins. The topic itself does this by engaging in conversations about how technology shifts power, and how it can create power balance by shifting power back to these communities.

As organizers, we are committed to centering these communities by inviting nearly or all Black womxn or Indigenous speakers. These are the folks historically left out of this conversation, despite being the leaders in the field.

We are also committed to running a workshop that fosters the inclusion of all attendees. We intend to make sure that the workshop’s activities, including participatory co-creation activities are designed for many kinds of accessibility needs.