Dee Mooney, Executive Director, Micron Foundation | Micron Insight'18

Dee Mooney, Executive Director, Micron Foundation, sits down with Dave Vellante and David Floyer for Micron Insight'18 at Pier 27 in San Francisco, CA.

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Micron Foundation is ‘Advancing Curiosity’ in AI ethics with $1M grant

Artificial intelligence is the new frontier of technology, precipitating a global labor revolution across every industry. Despite its growing prominence among thought leaders and consumers alike, the tool has been controversial since the early days of its widening implementation.

Concerns regarding the displacement of human employees in favor of robot labor, and the risks around harmful patterns becoming innate to machine learning have been voiced as loudly as the announcements of an advancing technology that dissenters fear is scaling all too quickly — and without proper ethical guidance.

To bring greater visibility into these issues and turn the tides of this rapidly growing tech, Micron Technology Inc.’s Micron Foundation is focusing on the human side of artificial intelligence.

“The Micron Foundation’s mission is to enhance lives through people and philanthropy, and we focus on [science, technology, engineering, and math] and basic human needs to bring our goodness and focus to AI, and the problems that can be solved utilizing it,” said Dee Mooney (pictured), executive director of the Micron Foundation.

In its continued commitment to the future of tech’s welfare, the Micron Foundation announced a $1 million grant to advance the industry conversation around the social ramifications of AI and curb them by building principles into the technology and its surrounding culture.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Dee Mooney in our Women in Tech feature.

AI for the greater good
The market for AI tools is expected to swell to over $2 million by 2022, growing over 30 percent every year. As the ecosystem rapidly expands, the Micron Foundation aims to take a mindful approach to its development.

Micron is allocating 20 percent of its $100 million financial investment to startups led by women and underrepresented figures in the tech industry. And it also launched a $1 million grant for academic and non-profits organizations to pursue advancements in AI.

The aptly named Advancing Curiosity grant is focused on retooling AI for the greater good, through innovation in the technology itself, as well as in diverse representation among its creators. “It is focusing on advancing curiosity in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that’s in business and health or life,” Mooney said.

Grant criteria focused on organizations whose missions take a conscious approach to developing impactful technology by asking what problems they’re solving with AI, what type of technology they’re using, and what groups are represented among their ranks.

“We are all about trying to improve our communities. We want students and researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work, [and] we want a very diverse group that brings different perspectives. That’s our true ability to innovate,” she said.

Winners were announced at Micron Insight 2018 and included the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab, the Stanford Precision, Health, and Integrated Diagnostics lab, and the non-profit organization AI For All, a group that encourages historically marginalized students to engage in tech and AI from a young age through STEM summer camps.

“Their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help underrepresented groups be exposed to the field,” Mooney said.

Building ethical technology
Among the range of effects artificial intelligence will have on the market, Micron urges grant applicants and technologists at large to consider the technology’s ethical ramifications throughout its development. Implications of the mass data collection AI requires to perform is one issue top of mind for the foundation.

“We’d like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data,” Mooney said.

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Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Micron Insight 2018. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Micron Insight event. Neither Micron Technology Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)