Who defines AI, and whose interests does it serve?
That is the question Dr Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell_ai will bring to the Deep Learning Indaba 2026 keynote stage in Lagos this August.
Dr Mitchell is a Researcher and Chief Ethics Scientist at @huggingface Face, where she leads work on ML data processing, responsible AI development and AI ethics. She was previously at Google where she founded and co-led Google's Ethical AI group to advance foundational AI ethics research and operationalise AI ethics Google-internally. 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 has published over 100 papers on natural language generation, assistive technology, computer vision, and AI ethics, and holds multiple patents in the areas of AI conversation generation and sentiment classification. She has been recognised for her leadership and ingenuity in public fora such as TIME's Most Influential People in the world, Fortune's Top Innovators, and Lighthouse3's 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. Her work has received awards from Secretary of Defence Ash Carter and the American Foundation for the Blind, and has been implemented by multiple technology companies. She is most known for her work pioneering "Model Cards" for ML model reporting; developing "Seeing AI" to assist blind and low-vision individuals; and developing methods to mitigate unwanted AI biases.
In her keynote, she will examine the promise and the reality of the pursuit of AI, interrogating the assumptions and fact-checking common narratives. Her case is that the way we advance AI today is largely controlled by a small set of actors with concentrated interests, and that this risks prioritising power, influence and market position over measurable human benefit.
It is a session for anyone who wants AI that answers to communities rather than to incumbents.
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