creators

Abeba Birhane: AI Accountability Lab, Trinity Dublin

Abeba Birhane is an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin and founder of its AI Accountability Lab, auditing AI models and training datasets.

Abeba Birhane is an Ethiopian-born cognitive scientist who works on algorithmic auditing and AI accountability. Trinity College Dublin lists her as Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence in its School of Computer Science and Statistics; she founded the university's AI Accountability Lab in 2024 and still leads it. She took psychology and philosophy degrees at The Open University and a PhD from University College Dublin, which her own lab dates to 2022. With Vinay Prabhu she audited the image datasets the field was training on and found racist and misogynistic labels in ImageNet and in MIT's 80 Million Tiny Images; MIT withdrew the second permanently in July 2020 and asked researchers to delete their copies. Her later work covers algorithmic colonialism, data extraction from the Global South and the uneven burden AI systems place on people with the least power. She was named to TIME's TIME100 AI list in 2023, served on the UN Secretary-General's AI Advisory Body, and appears on the Irish government's published membership list for the AI Advisory Council. Mozilla, which she advised on AI accountability as a Senior Advisor, announced that UN appointment in October 2023. In February 2026 she gave evidence to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence as the lab's director.

Specialization

AI accountability, algorithmic auditing, dataset bias, AI policy

Country

Ireland