The Continent's Africans of the Year: Timnit Gebru

At the end of a tumultuous year for both her professional life and her country of ancestry, Dr Timnit Gebru decided to do more than complain about the impact that technology was having on political discourse and established an institute specifically to address the harms that artificial intelligence (AI) causes on marginalised groups. Not everyone would have the courage to take on a company so large that it's name is a verb -- over both its human resources record and on its policies -- but in a year in which the choices of tech companies have dominated political discourse, it is one of the more urgent questions of our time, and Gebru is on it. Through her public criticism of Google, Gebru has highlighted an important and developing debate in tech policy research. Her public confrontations online with senior management at Google underscore the ways in which tech platforms claiming to encourage research on their own systems end up producing hackneyed and partial accounts because they are unwilling to allow their work to stand up to true, rigorous, academic scrutiny. This is the challenge faced by researchers trying to understand the impact that algorithms are having on the way we receive, consume and respond to political information curated by proprietary AI models: How can we truly understand the impact that technology is having on our public sphere if the tech companies won't let anyone see what's under the bonnet?