We are Black in Ai

Our origin story is a fundamental response to necessity. In 2016, at the Neural Information Systems Conference in Barcelona, computer scientist Timnit Gebru counted just six Black people out of 5,500 attendees, and that was including herself. If our representation was that scant at the world’s largest international academic AI conference where scientists network, present their research, and forge critical career-changing opportunities, she reasoned, more localized conferences were very likely even less diverse. Somebody had to do something.
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Later that year, Gebru—the first Black woman to be hired as a research scientist at Google in the United States—brainstormed a solution with fellow history-maker Rediet Abebe, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in computer science from Cornell University and the first Black woman to become a tenure-track professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they co-founded Black in AI as a membership organization in 2017 and finalized its 501(c)(3) in 2018. To date, we’ve granted more than $1 million to support some 400+ AI practitioners to be present at major conferences. We don’t always have official numbers, but our goal is to never count just six of us at any premier event ever again.