Olga Russakovsky

Olga Russakovsky is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. Her research considers computer vision and machine learning. She was one of the leaders of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition challenge and has been recognised by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's top young innovators.

Olga Russakovsky
Alma materStanford University
Scientific career
InstitutionsCarnegie Mellon University
Princeton University
ThesisScaling Up Object Detection (2015)
Doctoral advisorFei-Fei Li

Early life and education

Russakovsky studied mathematics at Stanford University and remained there for her doctoral studies.[1] When she finished her undergraduate degree she had dismissed computer science and felt disconnected from research and the only woman in her laboratory.[2] Then Fei-Fei Li arrived at Stanford. Russakovsky eventually completed her PhD in computer vision in 2015, during which she worked with Fei-Fei Li on image classification.[3] She developed an algorithm that could separate selected objects from the background, which made her acutely aware of human bias.[3] She worked on mechanisms to reduce the burden of image classification on human annotators, by asking fewer, and more generalised, questions about the images being inspected.[3] Together with Fei-Fei Li, Russakovsky developed ImageNet, a database of millions of images that is now widely used in computer vision.[3] She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.[1]

Research and career

Russakovsky works on computer vision and machine learning.[4] She is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.[1][5] Her research has considered the historical and societal bias within visual recognition and the development of computational solutions that promote algorithmic fairness.[6][7] For example, in 2015, a new photo identification application developed by Google labeled a black couple as "gorillas".[3] At the time only 2% of their workforce were African American.[3] Russakovsky has emphasised that whilst the workforces designing artificial intelligence systems are not diverse enough, only improving the diversity of computer scientists will not be sufficient for rectifying algorithmic bias.[3][8] Instead, she has involved training deep learning models that de-correlate protected characteristics such as race or gender.[6] In 2019 she was awarded a Schmidt DaraX grant to study accuracy in image captioning systems.[9]

Public engagement

Russakovsky has been involved in several initiatives to improve access to computer science and public understanding of artificial intelligence.[10] She serves on the board of AI4ALL foundation, which looks to improve diversity in artificial intelligence.[11] As part of AI4ALL Russakovsky led a summer camp for high school girls.[12][13] She ran the first summer camp in 2015, named the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's Outreach Summer Program (SAILORS). By 2018 it had expanded into six other US campuses.[14][15] She has launched similar initiatives at Princeton University.[1][16] The summer camp looks to keep bias out of artificial intelligence by educating people from diverse backgrounds about computer science, machine learning and policy.[17][18] One of the 2019 camp attendees from Bergen County Academy was so inspired by the event she founded an artificial intelligence program when she returned to high school.[17]

Selected publications

Russakovsky is the lead author of "Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge,"[19] which appeared in International Journal of Computer Vision in 2015. The paper describes the creation of a publicly available dataset of millions of images of everyday objects and scenes, and its use in an annual competition between the visual recognition algorithms of participating institutions. The paper discusses the challenges of creating such a large dataset, the developments in algorithmic object classification and detection that have resulted from the competition, and the current (at time of publication) state of the object recognition field. According to the journal website, the article has been cited over 5,000 times.[20] According to Google Scholar, which includes citations of the pre-print of the article on arXiv, the article has been cited over 13,000 times in total.[21]

Russakovsky is the author of more than 20 other academic articles, six of which have been cited more than 100 times each, according to Google Scholar.

Awards and honours

Russakovsky's awards and honours include:

References
  1. "Olga Russakovsky". Computer Science Department. Princeton University. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  2. "Fei-Fei Li's Quest to Make Machines Better for Humanity". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  3. "Making Smart Machines Fair". Princeton Alumni Weekly. 2018-05-25. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  4. "Olga Russakovsky". www.cs.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  5. Naughton, John (2019-11-23). "To secure a safer future for AI, we need the benefit of a female perspective | John Naughton". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  6. Friday; April 19; to 12:00pm, 2019-11:00am (2019-01-04). "Spring 2019 GRASP Seminar Series: Olga Russakovsky, Princeton University, "Computer vision meets fairness"". GRASP lab. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  7. Smith, Craig S. (2019-11-19). "Dealing With Bias in Artificial Intelligence". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  8. Friction, Natasha Mitchell for Science (2017-08-11). "Alexa, Siri, Cortana: Our virtual assistants say a lot about sexism". ABC News. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  9. "Schmidt DataX Fund supports research projects that harness data science to speed up discovery". Princeton University. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  10. Russakovsky, Olga. "Most AI researchers are the same type of people. Here's why this is a terrible thing". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  11. Russakovsky, Olga (2018-05-02). "AI4ALL: AI will change the world, but who will change AI?". O’Reilly Media. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  12. "Dr. Olga Russakovsky". AI4ALL. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  13. "Meet the Innovators Under 35 - AI Bias Roundtable - MIT Technology Review". MIT Technology Review Events. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  14. Smiley, Lauren (2018-05-23). "The Future of AI Depends on High-School Girls". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  15. "Subscribe to read". Financial Times. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  16. "Olga Russakovsky Ph.D. | Princeton AI4ALL". ai4all.princeton.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  17. Klein, Alyson (2019-08-28). "A Summer Camp With a Long Plan: Keeping Bias Out of Artificial Intelligence - Education Week". Education Week. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  18. "Princeton program empowers youth to shape the future of artificial intelligence". Princeton University. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  19. Russakovsky, Olga; Deng, Jia; Su, Hao; Krause, Jonathan; Satheesh, Sanjeev; Ma, Sean; Huang, Zhiheng; Karpathy, Andrej; Khosla, Aditya; Bernstein, Michael; Berg, Alexander; Fei-Fei, Li (December 2015). "ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge". International Journal of Computer Vision. 115 (3): 211–252. doi:10.1007/s11263-015-0816-y. hdl:1721.1/104944.
  20. "International Journal of Computer Vision". Springer. doi:10.1007/s11263-015-0816-y. hdl:1721.1/104944. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  21. "Russakovsky: Imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge". Google Scholar. Retrieved 30 November 2019.
  22. "The Leading Global Thinkers of 2015 - Foreign Policy". 2015globalthinkers.foreignpolicy.com. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  23. "Mark Everingham Prize". IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  24. "Olga Russakovsky | Innovators Under 35". www.innovatorsunder35.com. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  25. "Anita Borg Award (BECA)".
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