Dr. Timnit Gebru Is Our 2025 Miles Conrad Awardee
We are delighted to announce that Dr. Timnit Gebru, Executive Director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), will be the recipient of the 2025 Miles Conrad Award, NISO’s lifetime achievement award for those working in the information community. She will receive her award and deliver the 2025 Miles Conrad Lecture virtually during the NISO Plus Baltimore conference at 3:15 pm EST on Wednesday, February 12, 2025.
Prior to founding DAIR, Dr. Timnit Gebru was co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google, where she was fired in December 2020 after raising issues of discrimination in the workplace. Timnit also co-founded Black in AI, a nonprofit that works to increase the presence, inclusion, visibility and health of Black people in the field of AI, and is on the board of AddisCoder, a nonprofit dedicated to teaching algorithms and computer programming to Ethiopian and Jamaican high school students. She has received a number of accolades, including being named one of Nature’s Ten people who helped shape science and one of TIME's 100 most influential people. She is currently writing The View from Somewhere, a memoir + manifesto arguing for a technological future that serves our communities instead of one that is used for surveillance, warfare, and the centralization of power by Silicon Valley.
Dr. Gebru holds a bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
“We are honored to have Dr. Gebru deliver this year’s Miles Conrad Lecture,” said Jason Griffey, NISO’s Director of Strategic Initiatives. “The award recognizes her critical work on the dangers of biases in AI as the information community grapples with ethics and rapidly advancing technologies. We look forward to hearing her views about the opportunities and risks inherent in the use of AI in an imperfect world.”
The 2025 NISO Plus Baltimore conference will take place in person on February 10–12 at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. For more information, please visit https://niso.plus.
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of information standards. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). For more information, visit the NISO website (https://niso.org) or contact us at nisohq@niso.org.