Liz O’Sullivan is an expert in practical Artificial Intelligence.

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Bio

Since earning a degree in Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill, Liz has had a career of 12 years in AI startups in NYC tech, most notably at computer vision company Clarifai where she first spoke out publicly about the limitations of AI in high-risk scenarios. Liz then decided to become a part of the solution, joining two organizations intending to protect those most at-risk from AI harm. Liz was the first staff member, the Technology Director, for New York nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) and cofounder / VP of Responsible AI at AI Explainability and model monitoring company Arthur. Liz left Arthur and STOP in May of 2021 to cofound the AI validation company Vera. In 2022, she became an inaugural member of the National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC), providing guidance on our nation’s AI strategy to the White House via NIST and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Her work includes…

Talks & Panels

April, 2024: 2024 Keynote speaker at Women in Data Science, UNC-Charlotte

November, 2023: Reuters NEXT, World Stage

May 2021: Beyond Fair CV with Timnit Gebru and Emily Denton

December 2020: NeurIPS Workshop on Data and Security: “Don’t Steal Data.”

September 2020: NYU Stern Fubon Center Innovation Conference: Challenges and approaches to bringing AI to production enterprise.

May 2020 - Harvard Business School Case Subject for: “Employee Activism”, Reimagining Capitalism MBA Class

December 2019 - NeurIPS: “Minding the Gap: Between Fairness and Ethics” (link)

 

Informing the Press

A curated sample of quotes and features:

Wall Street Journal - Generative AI Botched Their Headshots

TechCrunch - Vera, 2023 feature announcing $2.7M pre-seed round.

Runtime News: Why security pros are wary - and excited - about GenAI

New York Times: Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos

BBC: People Fixing the World (AI Bias & work at Arthur AI)

WIRED: Arthur coming out of stealth announcement

NPR: FaceApp is a National Security threat

New York Times: Facial Recognition and public datasets

New York Times debut: Is ethical AI even possible?

Media Engagements

The Indicator, Planet Money Podcast: When AI works in HR (link)

Radical AI Podcast: The State of the Union of Surveillance: Are Things Getting Better? (link)

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Episode: Facial Recognition (link)

NBC: How does Facial Recognition work? (link)

CNN: FaceApp shows our lack of privacy law is a threat to national security

The Tamron Hall Show: Amazon Alexa is listening to you (link)

 

Non-Blog Writing

TechCrunch: How the law got it wrong on Apple Card (link)

Fast Company: WhatsApp Facebook’s ultimatum to users reveals a privacy disaster (link)

TechCrunch: Here are a few ways GPT-3 could go wrong (link)

VentureBeat: White House AI Regulation Doesn’t Go Far Enough (link)

ACLU: Why I Quit My Job Over Killer Robots (link)