AI Alessandra Sala

Alessandra Sala is the Sr Director of AI and Data Science at Shutterstock, the Global President of Women in AI (https://www.womeninai.co ), the Technology Advisory Board Member at CeADAR (http://www.ceadar.ie ) and the Governance Committee Chair at the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning.

Alessandra is a female research and scientific leader who has devoted her career to drive changes in the field of AI both on a technical and regulatory level. Alessandra has over 10 years’ experience in research and innovation gained whilst working in academic and commercial environments. Alessandra is passionate advanced analytics, machine learning, and computational models with the focus of transferring innovation from research to products.

As Global President of Women in AI (a non-profit do-tank working towards gender-inclusive AI that benefits global society) Alessandra is working with a strong community of women to foster diversity, inclusion and equity for women and minorities while encouraging a global ethical approach in AI.

Alessandra is driving changes through three sets of focused activities:

1) Regulations for the benefit of general public.                                                                             The goal of this effort was to influence governments and specialized agencies to invest in developing AI skills and literacy. The top three achievements are listed in the following:

      (i) Steering Member of the “AI Skills: A Preliminary Assessment of the Skills Needed for the Deployment, Management and Regulation of Artificial Intelligence” report link https://www.skillsireland.ie/all-publications/2022/ai-skills-report.pdf ,

       (ii)  Participation to the UNESCO’s discussion on the “Recommendation on the Ethics of AI” via a number of workshops and public dissemination activities as webinar participations, as for instance
https://events.unesco.or/event?id=2965770889&lang=1033 ), and public presence to press release of the actual Recommendation on the ethics of AI with a general address summarized here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6872514788212252672/

        (iii) One page of the National AI Strategy in Ireland, i.e. on Page 59 in https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/national-ai-strategy.pdf, was dedicated to Women in AI Ireland, with the goal to demonstrate the effort in the country to embrace diversity and forming an
inclusive environment for future talent in AI. The vision is to focus on women and minorities with the aim to bring empowerment, knowledge and active collaboration via a number of programs from education, research and skill development events.

2) Reducing the AI talent gap via new Education programs.                                                                                             The goal of this effort was to demonstrate that programs designed with diversity in mind would attract more women and minorities. As Global President of Women in AI and former Ambassador of Women in AI Ireland, Alessandra has worked to create a number of initiatives to develop an AI educational programs that was accessible to women and minorities.
               • In collaboration with ICT Skillnet, Alessandra was part of the design of the first National AI master first launched with the University of Limerick.
                • Women in AI global education activities are listed at https://www.womeninai.co/education with a special focus on the activities in Ireland https://www.womeninai.co/wailearn
                • A key mandate for WAI Ireland when Alessandra was the Ambassador was to address the low numbers of young female undergraduate students in STEM related field. To addresses the lack of gender and minorities diversity in AI education at national level, Alessandra in collaboration with ICT Skillnet, Technology University Dublin and local entrepreneurs and her Women in AI team designed the first CPD Certificate In Foundations Of Artificial Intelligence. The program targets women and minorities who have an interest in gaining foundational skills and knowledge to enter a career as an AI specialist or to continue into further education in AI. Ref. https://www.ictskillnet.ie/training/foundations-certificate-in-artificial-intelligence/

3)Industrial Ethical AI Program.
The goal of this effort was to design a practical Diversity and Inclusion Program which could become a beacon in helping the AI community to establish guiding principles and common practice towards Ethical AI. Alessandra enabled the creation of a four pillars AI Ethics Program:

• Creating Diversity in Data. At Shutterstock we source content with diversity via a network of over 2 million contributors from more than 150 countries and we encourage us to create with diversity in mind. The aim is to empower historically excluded artists, help fill content gaps, and further diversity and inclusion within our content library and contributor network.

• Audited Process. Machine-learning models are commonly trained on large amounts of real world data. This could entail the risk of inheriting human biases as it is observed in everyday life. Machine learning models can be very powerful and without proper testing not only could recycle these biases but could also enhance these phenomena. Alessandra has led the development of a novel approach to test AI models for a number of different biases from gender to ethnicity and behavioural.

• Diverse and Inclusive Teams. This effort starts with building a diverse tech talent pipeline. We have established partnerships with organizations, like Black Girls Code, Black Professionals in Tech Network, Women Who Code and Women in AI that are on the frontline of increasing diversity in Tech. Through these partnerships, we are providing role models and additional support to develop those who have been historically excluded or underrepresented in the tech industry. Alessandra has built her first 40-60 gender balance team in Ireland our AI division which is an enormous improvement compared to the average 22% participation in this field. This team also brings diverse culture and backgrounds as its members are from South Africa, Spain, US, Canada, Malaysia, Ireland, Greece and Italy.

• Ethical Training: Machine-Learning models have the potential to solve the world’s biggest challenges, but they can also pose risks to individuals and groups. As we develop this technology, we must consider its ethical ramifications. Responsible design and use of AI starts with training the technical teams to question their inventions with wider social, economic and cultural perspectives. We have partnered with the World Ethical Data Foundation (https://worldethicaldata.org/) which is developing a specialized training for Shutterstock’s employees to raise awareness of the societal impacts of AI technology and to give our technical employees the tools and knowledge to pursue responsible AI.