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Technology

Google offered a professor $60,000, but he turned it down. Here’s why

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He put in for the award, he said, “because of my sense at the time that Google was building a really strong, potentially industry-leading ethical AI team.”

Soon after, that feeling began to dissipate. In early December, Timnit Gebru, the co-leader of Google’s ethical AI team and a prominent Black woman in a mostly White, male field, abruptly left Google. On Wednesday, December 2, she tweeted that she had been “immediately fired” for an email she sent to an internal mailing list. In the email she expressed dismay over the ongoing lack of diversity at the company and frustration over an internal process related to the review of a then-unpublished research paper about the risks of building ever-larger AI language models — a buzzy kind of AI that is increasingly important to Google’s enormous search business.

At the time, Gebru said Google AI leadership told her to retract the paper from consideration for presentation at a conference, or remove her name from it. Google said it accepted Gebru’s resignation over a list of demands she had sent via email that needed to be met for her to continue working at the company.

Gebru’s ouster kicked off a months-long crisis for the company, including employee departures, a leadership shuffle, and an apology from Google’s CEO for how the circumstances of Gebru’s departure caused some employees to question their place there. Google conducted an internal investigation into the matter, results of which were announced on the same day the company fired Gebru’s co-team leader, Margaret Mitchell, who had been consistently critical of the company on Twitter following Gebru’s exit. (Google cited “multiple violations” of its code of conduct.) Meanwhile, researchers outside Google, particularly in AI, have become increasingly distrustful of the company’s historically well-regarded scholarship and angry over its treatment of Gebru and Mitchell.

All of this came into sharp focus for Stark on Wednesday, March 10, when Google sent him a congratulatory note, offering him $60,000 for his proposal for a research project that would look at how companies are rolling out AI that is used to detect emotions. Stark said he immediately felt he needed to reject the award to show his support for Gebru and Mitchell, as well as those who yet remain on the ethical AI team at Google.

“My first thought was, ‘I have to turn it down’,” Stark told CNN Business.

Stark is among a growing number of people in academia who are citing the exits of Gebru and Mitchell for recent decisions to forfeit funding or opportunities provided by the company. Some AI conference organizers are rethinking having Google as a sponsor. And at least one academic who has received a big check from Google in the past has since declared he won’t seek its financial support until changes are made at the company.

“In good conscience, I can no longer accept funding from a company that treats its employees in this manner,” Vijay Chidambaram, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies storage systems, told CNN Business. Chidambaram previously received $30,000 from Google in 2018 for a research project.

The money involved is of little consequence to Google. But the widening fallout from Google’s tensions with its ethical AI team now pose a risk to the company’s reputation and stature in the AI community. This is crucial as Google battles for talent — both as employees at the company and names connected to it in the academic community.

“I think this is wider spread than even the company realizes,” Stark said.

Declining in solidarity

Despite his initial inclination, Stark didn’t immediately refuse Google’s award. He spoke to colleagues about what he planned to do — “People were supportive of whichever decision I made,” he said — before sending Google his response the following Friday. He thanked the company for the “vote of confidence” in his research, but wrote that he was “declining this award in solidarity with Drs. Gebru and Mitchell, their teammates, and all those who’ve been in similar situations”, according to emails viewed by CNN Business.

“I look forward to the possibility of collaborating with Google Research again, at such time as the organization and its leaders have reflected on their decision in this case, addressed the harms they’ve caused, and committed, in word and deed, to fostering critical research and products that support equity and justice,” Stark wrote.

He tweeted about his decision to reject the award as well, to make it public, noting that many people can’t afford to turn down such funding from Google or other companies. Stark is able to forgo the money because his department at Western University is sufficiently funded. The award from Google would have provided extra research money, he said.
“All we can do is what we can reasonably do — and this was something I felt I could,” Stark tweeted.

Gebru said she appreciated Stark’s action.

“It’s a pretty huge deal for someone to decline Google sponsorship,” she told CNN Business. “Especially someone who’s early in their career.”

A Google spokesperson said that, over the past 15 years, the company has furnished over 6,500 academic and research grants to those outside Google. Stark is the first person to turn one down, according to the spokesperson.

“It was a real fiasco the way they were treated”

Yet Stark’s decision is just the latest show of solidarity with Gebru and Mitchell.

The first obvious sign of anger came just after Gebru left Google. A Medium post decrying her departure and demanding transparency about Google’s decision regarding the research paper quickly gained signatures of Google employees and supporters within the academic and AI fields; by late March, its number of supporters had swelled to nearly 2,700 Google employees and over 4,300 others.
In early March, the conference to which Gebru and her coauthors had submitted the paper, the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, or FAccT, halted its sponsorship agreement with Google. Gebru is one of the conference’s founders, and served as a member of FAccT’s first executive committee. Google had been a sponsor each year since the annual conference began in 2018. Michael Ekstrand, co-chair of the ACM FAccT Network, confirmed to CNN Business that the sponsorship was halted, saying the move was determined to be “in the best interests of the community” and that the group will “revisit” its sponsorship policy for 2022. Ekstrand said Gebru was not involved in the decision.
Also in March, two academics protested Google’s actions by tweeting that they decided not to attend an invitation-only robotics research event that was being held online. Hadas Kress-Gazit, a Cornell robotics professor, was one of them; she said she was invited in January but grew more reticent as the event drew closer.

“It was a real fiasco the way [Gebru and Mitchell] were treated. Nobody apologized to them yet even,” she told CNN Business in a recent interview. “I don’t want to interact with companies that behave that way toward top researchers.”

Google’s efforts to push boundaries in AI

Google is aware that its reputation as a research institution has been harmed in recent months, and the company has said it’s intent on fixing it. In a recent Google town hall meeting, which Reuters first reported on and CNN Business has also obtained audio from, the company outlined changes it’s making to its internal research and publication practices.

“I think the way to regain trust is to continue to publish cutting-edge work in many, many areas, including pushing the boundaries on responsible-AI-related topics, publishing things that are deeply interesting to the research community, I think is one of the best ways to continue to be a leader in the research field,” Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, said. He was responding to an employee question regarding outside researchers saying they will read papers from Google “with more skepticism now.”

Gebru hopes that, like FAccT, more conferences will reevaluate their relationships with tech companies’ research labs. Historically, much of the work in the development and study of AI has been performed within academic settings. But as companies have found more and more commercial uses for the technology, the lines between the academic and corporate worlds have blurred. Google is just one of many tech companies that wields a large amount of influence over academic conferences that publish many of its researchers’ papers; its employees sit on conference boards and it sponsors numerous conferences each year, sometimes to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

For instance, Google and some subsidiaries of its parent company, Alphabet, were listed as $20,000 “platinum” and $10,000 “gold” level sponsors at the International Conference on Machine Learning, or ICML and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, in 2020 — both key AI conferences. And some of the company’s employees sit on their organizing committees.

ICML president John Langford said the conference is “presently open for sponsorship” by Google for its 2021 conference, which is set for July.

“There is quite a bit of discussion ongoing about how ICML as a conference should encourage good machine learning culture and practices with future sponsorship policy a part of that discussion,” he added.

NeurIPS executive director Mary Ellen Perry said the conference hasn’t yet made its annual call for sponsorships, but that requests “will be evaluated against a set of selection guidelines put in place by this year’s sponsorship chairs”; NeurIPS is scheduled for December.

For Stark and others in the academic research community, however, their criteria for accepting funds from Google have already changed.

“Extra research money would be great,” Stark said. “But it was something I felt like I just couldn’t take.”



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Science

Sperms Whales Learned How to Dodge Harpoons And Taught The Skills to Others

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Sperm whales taught each other how to avoid harpoons after hunting for them began 200 years ago, according to a new study.

Published by the Royal Society on Wednesday, the research was based on newly digitized logbooks from American whalers, which recorded details of their expeditions in the North Pacific during the 19th century, such as the number of whales spotted or harpooned.

 

Although they were in high demand for their whalebone, ivory, and blubber and almost 80,000 ‘voyage days’ recorded, there were only 2,405 successful whale sightings, a mere 3 percent success rate.

The study’s authors, cetacean researchers Professor Hal Whitehead and Dr. Luke Rendell, as well as data scientist Dr. Tim D Smith, also found that the strike rate of the whalers’ harpoons fell by 58 percent in less than two and half years after they first began hunting in the region.

In Halifax, Canada, Professor Whitehead of Dalhousie University told The Owen Sun Sound Times: “That was very remarkable. I thought there might be a drop, but not that much and not that quickly.

“Usually, you expect it to increase as they figure out stuff and become more successful. That’s typically how our exploitation of wildlife goes. We become more efficient as we learn how to do it.”

The study concluded that sperm whales had learned how they were being killed, shared this information with their pod, and changed their behavior accordingly, displaying “cultural evolution.”

The species live with their children in female-only pods or groups, allowing them to form close links and share tips to evade hunters.

 

The hunters recognized the sperm whales had developed tactics to evade them. Instead of forming defensive squares used to fight off their natural predators, the killer whale, the sperm whales, understood that swimming against the wind would allow them to outrun the wind-powered hunters’ ships.

The advent of steam power and grenade harpoons in the later years of the 19th century meant even the canny sperm whale was doomed to mass slaughter, however.

“This was cultural evolution, much too fast for genetic evolution,” says Whitehead.

Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal on the planet and the researchers highlighted that if they were able to adapt 200 years ago, they could probably also face the ocean’s challenges today.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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US

Harvard professor ignites uproar over ‘comfort women’ claims

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) – A Harvard University professor has ignited an international uproar and faces mounting scrutiny for alleging that Korean women who were kept as sex slaves in wartime Japan had actually chosen to work as prostitutes.

In a recent academic paper, J. Mark Ramseyer rejected a wide body of research finding that Japan’s so-called “comfort women” were forced to work at military brothels during World War II. Ramseyer instead argued that the women willingly entered into contracts as sex workers.

His paper has intensified a political dispute between Japan, whose leaders deny that the women were coerced, and South Korea, which has long pressed Japan to provide apologies and compensation to women who have shared accounts of rape and abuse.

Decades of research has explored the abuses inflicted on comfort women from Korea and other nations previously occupied by Japan. In the 1990s, women began sharing accounts detailing how they were taken to comfort stations and forced to provide sexual services for the Japanese military.

In this Feb. 25, 2021, photo, high school students hold up banners to protest a recent academic paper by Harvard University professor J. Mark Ramseyer, behind statues symbolizing wartime sex slaves in Seoul, South Korea. The signs read: “J. Mark Ramseyer, are you a 21st century professor at Harvard? Are you a university professor in the Japanese Empire 100 years ago? We criticize anti-human rights research.” (Lee Jung-hoon/Yonhap via AP)

Hundreds of scholars have signed letters condemning Ramseyer’s article, which united North and South Korea in sparking outrage. Last Tuesday, North Korea’s state-run DPRK Today published an article calling Ramseyer a “repulsive money grubber” and a “pseudo scholar.”

Ramseyer, a professor of Japanese legal studies at Harvard Law School, declined to comment.

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Ramseyer’s article, titled “Contracting for sex in the Pacific War,” was published online in December and was scheduled to appear in the March issue of the International Review of Law and Economics. The issue has been suspended, however, and the journal issued an “expression of concern” saying the piece is under investigation.

Most alarming to historians is what they say is a lack of evidence in the paper: Scholars at Harvard and other institutions have combed though Ramseyer’s sources and say there is no historical evidence of the contracts he describes.

FILE – In this Aug. 14, 2019, file photo, Lee Yong-soo, who was forced to serve for the Japanese troops as a sex slave during World War II, touches the face of a statue of a girl symbolizing the issue of wartime “comfort women” during its unveiling ceremony in Seoul, South Korea. Harvard University law professor J. Mark Ramseyer alleged in a December 2020 article, scheduled to appear in the March 2021 issue of the International Review of Law and Economics, that the Korean women had actually chosen to work as prostitutes. Lee described Ramseyer’s claim as “ludicrous” and demanded an apology. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)

In a statement calling for the article to be retracted, Harvard historians Andrew Gordon and Carter Eckert said Ramseyer “has not consulted a single actual contract” dealing with comfort women.

“We do not see how Ramseyer can make credible claims, in extremely emphatic wording, about contracts he has not read,” they wrote.

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Alexis Dudden, a historian of modern Japan and Korea at the University of Connecticut, called the article a “total fabrication” that disregards decades of research. Although some have invoked academic freedom to defend Ramseyer, Dudden counters that the article “does not meet the requirements of academic integrity.”

“These are assertions out of thin air,” she said. “It’s very clear from his writing and his sources that he has never seen a contract.”

FILE – In this March 1, 2017, file photo, former “comfort woman” Lee Yong-soo, left, who was forced to serve for the Japanese troops as a sex slave during World War II, shouts slogans during a rally to mark the March First Independence Movement Day, the anniversary of the 1919 uprising against Japanese colonial rule, near the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Harvard University law professor J. Mark Ramseyer alleged in a December 2020 article, scheduled to appear in the March 2021 issue of the International Review of Law and Economics, that the Korean women had actually chosen to work as prostitutes. Lee described Ramseyer’s claim as “ludicrous” and demanded an apology. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)

More than 1,000 economists have signed a separate letter condemning the article, saying it misuses economic theory “as a cover to legitimize horrific atrocities.” A separate group of historians of Japan issued a 30-page article explaining why the article should be retracted “on grounds of academic misconduct.”

At Harvard, hundreds of students signed a petition demanding an apology from Ramseyer and a university response to the complaints against him. Harvard Law School declined to comment.

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A United Nations report from 1996 concluded that the comfort women were sex slaves taken through “violence and outright coercion.” A statement from Japan in 1993 acknowledged that women were taken “against their own will,” although the nation’s leaders later denied it.

Tensions flared again in January when a South Korean court ruled that the Japanese government must give 100 million won ($90,000) to each of 12 women who sued in 2013 over their wartime sufferings. Japan insists all wartime compensation issues were settled under a 1965 treaty normalizing relations with South Korea.

In South Korea, activists have denounced Ramseyer and called for his resignation from Harvard. Chung Young-ai, South Korea’s minister of gender equality and family, expressed dismay over the article last week.

“There is an attempt to distort (the facts about) the Japanese military’s ‘comfort women’ issue and tarnish the honors and dignity of victims,” Chung said, according to comments provided by her ministry.

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Lee Yong-soo, a 92-year-old South Korean and survivor, described Ramseyer’s assertion as “ludicrous” and demanded he apologize.

An influential activist, Lee is campaigning for South Korea and Japan to settle their decadeslong impasse by seeking judgment from the International Court of Justice.

When asked about Ramseyer last Wednesday, Lee said: “That professor should be dragged to (the ICJ) too.”

The controversy, amplified by its source at an Ivy League university, has yielded new scrutiny of Ramseyer’s other work.

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In response to new concerns raised by scholars, The European Journal of Law and Economics added an editor’s note saying it’s investigating a recent piece by Ramseyer — this one studying Koreans living in early 20th century Japan. Cambridge University Press said a forthcoming book chapter by Ramseyer is “being revised by the author after consultation between the author and the editors of the book.”

Ramseyer repeated his claims about comfort women in a submission to a Japanese news site in January. In it, he alleged the women entered into contracts similar to those used under a separate, licensed system of prostitution in Japan. He rejected accounts of forced labor as “pure fiction,” saying the Japanese army “did not dragoon Korean women to work in its brothels.”

“Expressing sympathy to elderly women who have had a rough life is fine,” he wrote. “Paying money to an ally in order to rebuild a stable relationship is fine. But the claims about enslaved Korean comfort women are historically untrue.”

Opponents counter that many of the women were so young they would have been unable to consent to sex even if there was evidence of contracts.

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“We’re really talking about 15-year-olds,” said Dudden, at the University of Connecticut. “This article further victimizes the very few number of survivors by asserting claims that even the author knows cannot be substantiated.”

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US

California professor put on paid administrative leave after video shows him chastising student who is hard of hearing

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Last Thursday, a two-minute video — broken into three parts for TikTok — surfaced showing a Zoom recording from a physiology class at Oxnard College that day taught by professor Michael Abram, who is identified in the video by name and by a student in his class.

CNN has reached out to Abram multiple times via email and phone but has not heard back.

When the posted video begins, it’s not clear whether the professor is aware the student, who later self identifies in the video as hard of hearing, needs assistance with her hearing. CNN is not naming the student because she declined to speak to us.

He asks the student, who says she can hear him a little bit, why she hasn’t been answering.

“You can hear me a little bit? Abram asks. “Why didn’t you answer all the times I spoke to you then?

The student attempts to respond, but Abram continues to talk over her.

“I’m hard of hearing,” she says in response to Abram.

“Why don’t we talk sometime? Why don’t you email me? We’ll set up a live Zoom and we’re going to have some real communication at some point in time,” he says. “Maybe you can have your counselor join us, OK? Do you hear me? OK, wonderful, do that,” he says.

After that interaction, another female student on the Zoom class says the student is hard of hearing and cannot respond right away.

“She’s not paying attention, she’s not trying,” Abram says.

The other student says, “It’s slower on her end because she needs to get it translated and then it goes to her hearing piece.”

Abram tells the student who is hard of hearing to “have your counselor speak with me because you’ve got too much distraction to even understand what is going on.”

“Yes, I do because my translator is next to me explaining me everything that you’re saying,” she replies.

Abram suggests the student’s translator teach her moving forward.

“Just have them teach you, the whole class, that makes sense to me,” he says. “I don’t know, I don’t understand it,” adding he saw the student who is hard of hearing “laughing” and “giggling” with someone else and is not paying attention. She replies that she’s in a good mood.

Abram continues to repeatedly ask her to have her “counselor” talk to him, to which she agrees, but says she feels like he is “attacking” her.

“I’m not attacking you, I’m not attacking you,” he says. “I’m just significantly disappointed in you. That’s all, that’s all it is. I’m not attacking you.”

The professor is now on administrative leave, the college said in a statement. “I am saddened and outraged beyond words that any of our students should either be or feel disrespected by any of our employees,” acting President Luiz Sanchez said in a statement posted to Twitter.

The video was meant for administrators to review

Sarah Rand, a student in Abram’s class, took the original video that was then posted on TikTok by someone she described as a family friend.

Rand told CNN she took the video with the intention of sending it to administrators to show the behavior and commentary she said she and other students have seen during Abram’s classes this semester.

When asked at a press briefing Monday whether any prior complaints were made against Abram, administrators said they couldn’t comment because that is part of the investigation.

Abram was hired as a full time tenured-track professor in fall 2004 as a biology teacher but he has taught anatomy and physiology classes at Oxnard College, according to Art Sandford, vice president of academic affairs and student learning.

On Friday, the Ventura County Community College District, of which Oxnard College is a part, issued a statement.

“The Ventura County Community College District is opposed to any language or behavior which is offensive or harmful to anyone based on gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, age or disability,” board Chair Joshua Chancer said in the statement. “Comments in the video do not reflect the District’s values of integrity and honesty in action and word, respect and the constant pursuit of excellence.”

The National Association of the Deaf said deaf and hard-of-hearing students vary in what they need in class, including interpreters, captioning and devices to assist them.

“The use of interpreters or captioning usually results in additional time for the deaf or hard of hearing student to receive all the information and then be able to respond,” CEO Howard A. Rosenblum said in a statement. “Professors must therefore be patient and accommodate this additional time, instead of berating such students.”

Administrators say campuses can make learning accommodations

The investigation could take up to 90 days to complete, Greg Gillespie, chancellor of the Ventura County Community College District, said at press briefing Monday.

“The instructor is entitled to due process under the law so it’s his constitutional right as a permanent public employee and so he will be on a paid leave until the investigation is complete and we’re able to determine what the findings bring us,” said Laura Lizaola Barroso, vice chancellor of human resources at Ventura County Community College District.

CNN has reached out to the Oxnard College Academic Senate, which has a voice in student and faculty matters.

Administrators said they have told students the district has the ability to make accommodations for any type of learning assistance that is needed. They said it’s important for students to let faculty or the educational assistance center staff know their needs.

The home college for the student who is hard-of-hearing is Moorpark, another one of Ventura’s campuses, according to administrators at the briefing. It’s not uncommon for a student to take classes at other campuses, especially now, when the majority of classes have shifted online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We know that the student was connected with the EAC (educational assistance center) folks at Moorpark College. However, we’re still looking into the status of the student with regards to whether or not accommodation had been requested for this Oxnard College class,” Gillespie said.

Administrators said they are in the process of meeting with and reaching out to the students involved.

Rand said at first she was worried that sharing the video with administrators may risk her graduation and her grades, but says without it, they wouldn’t know what’s happening with a faculty member.

“It’s our hope that we’ve created an environment where people are comfortable in coming forward so that these can be addressed, Gillespie said. “This incident is an example of where unacceptable behavior is seen occurring in a video and we’re going to investigate it and take that seriously.”

The administration said it also is proud of the other female student who spoke up on behalf of the student who is hard of hearing.

Rand said she never thought the video would be received on social media in the way that it has.

“No matter what this person did, I don’t think his reputation should be buried, like millions of people are hating him. That wasn’t my intention,” she said.

“I did this for other people to show that when you see something wrong, don’t just stay quiet, because this is abuse that’s happening that needs to stop,” said Rand. “Don’t be afraid. Speak up for the truth.”

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World

Anti-vaxxers campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines

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As the vaccine rollout continues, anti-vaccine campaigns are on the rise. To end the pandemic, health experts say a large part of the population must be vaccinated. As anti-vaxxer campaigns continue to gain traction, we asked Penn State College College of Medicine Professor Dr. Bernice Hausman if the anti-vaxxer campaigns gain traction, could they impact pandemic response?Dr. Hausman says “A lot of people are concerned. I feel like the concerned is a little bit misplaced.”Hausman has done extensive research on the controversy surrounding vaccination. She tells us it is important to understand the hesitancy. Myth #1: COVID-19 vaccines were developed too quicklyShe tells us, “The most common (myth) is that the vaccine was developed too quickly and there have not been enough studies to demonstrate safety.” Hausman stresses that the efficacy has been proven. Currently, there are two COVID-19 vaccines available and many more are in clinical trials. Each of the vaccines use different types of technology, some method are newer and less common than others. Hausman says, “People may have different comfort levels with different kinds of vaccines depending on how comfortable they are with technology.”Myth #2: COVID-19 data are not real or calculated incorrectlyAnother hesitancy stems from concerns over how COVID-19 data has been calculated. She says that health experts use data from national, county or city numbers and can understand why those numbers do not always connect with people who are skeptical.Hausman tells us, “People don’t experience vaccines at the population level. They experience them at the level of their own body or the body of their children or family member.” Hausman says as the rollout of vaccinations continues, more confidence can be built. Until then, she says the focus should be on the plan for distribution.

LANCASTER, Pa. —

As the vaccine rollout continues, anti-vaccine campaigns are on the rise.

To end the pandemic, health experts say a large part of the population must be vaccinated.

As anti-vaxxer campaigns continue to gain traction, we asked Penn State College College of Medicine Professor Dr. Bernice Hausman if the anti-vaxxer campaigns gain traction, could they impact pandemic response?

Dr. Hausman says “A lot of people are concerned. I feel like the concerned is a little bit misplaced.”

Hausman has done extensive research on the controversy surrounding vaccination. She tells us it is important to understand the hesitancy.

Myth #1: COVID-19 vaccines were developed too quickly

She tells us, “The most common (myth) is that the vaccine was developed too quickly and there have not been enough studies to demonstrate safety.” Hausman stresses that the efficacy has been proven.

Currently, there are two COVID-19 vaccines available and many more are in clinical trials. Each of the vaccines use different types of technology, some method are newer and less common than others.

Hausman says, “People may have different comfort levels with different kinds of vaccines depending on how comfortable they are with technology.”

Myth #2: COVID-19 data are not real or calculated incorrectly

Another hesitancy stems from concerns over how COVID-19 data has been calculated. She says that health experts use data from national, county or city numbers and can understand why those numbers do not always connect with people who are skeptical.

Hausman tells us, “People don’t experience vaccines at the population level. They experience them at the level of their own body or the body of their children or family member.”

Hausman says as the rollout of vaccinations continues, more confidence can be built. Until then, she says the focus should be on the plan for distribution.

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