A. Stevie Bergman, PhD

Welcome. I'm a public interest scientist and technologist,
with a global, human rights and ethics focus. I research questions
at the interface of technology and society, rights, and policy.

Areas of investigation include: (1) Sociotechnical research for effective technology policy and governance; (2) Data, annotation, and the hidden, often exploited labor underlying AI; (3) The impacts and implications of AI and other emerging technologies for at-risk and marginalized communities in the Majority World.

Expertise in human rights and international humanitarian aid, algorithmic fairness, participatory AI design, misinformation/disinformation and technology, multilingual AI, recommender systems, trust and safety classifiers, and
social media, science & research practices.

I have over a decade of experience in science &
technology communication.

Papers   //  CV   //   Twitter: @TVR2C

Senior Sociotechnical Research Scientist
Ethics Research team, Google DeepMind
New York City
April 2022-

At DeepMind I conduct sociotechnical research employing mixed methods on complex, open-ended problems across a host of interdisciplinary areas. These have included: democratic and participatory AI, sociotechnical AI evaluation, representation and fairness in AI, the impact of emerging technologies on non-Western, at-risk or in-conflict communities, societal impacts of generative AI (eg., mis- and disinformation), and the implications of design choices (eg., data curation and AI annotation with fair labor practices).


Past: Research Scientist in AI Fairness
Responsible AI, Meta
New York City
January 2020-22

At Meta I researched the practical implementation of ethical AI, with particular interest in contexts that aim to improve the situations of vulnerable and in-conflict communities globally. Additionally, I designed and taught an internal AI Fairness seminar to colleagues.


//////// Papers in AI Ethics/Tech & Society ////////

Released 2024: The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants: Access and Opportunity (Chapter 15)
A. Stevie Bergman, Renee Shelby, Iason Gabriel (Blog post)

CHI 2024: The Illusion of Artificial Inclusion
William Agnew, A. Stevie Bergman, Jennifer Chien, Mark Diaz, Seliem El-Sayed, Jaylen Pittman, Shakir Mohamed, Kevin R. McKee

Currently on arXiv (2023): Sociotechnical Safety Evaluation of Generative AI Systems
Laura Weidinger, Maribeth Rauh, Nahema Marchal, Arianna Manzini, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Juan Mateos-Garcia, Stevie Bergman, Jackie Kay, Conor Griffin, Ben Bariach, Iason Gabriel, Verena Rieser and William Isaac

ACM FAccT 2023: Representation in AI Evaluation
A. Stevie Bergman, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Maribeth Rauh, Boxi Wu, William Agnew, Markus Kunesch, Isabella Duan, Iason Gabriel, William Isaac

ACL Findings 2022: Towards Responsible Natural Language Annotation
for the Varieties of Arabic
A. Stevie Bergman and Mona Diab

ACM FAccT 2022: Adaptive Sampling Strategies to Construct Equitable Training Datasets
William Cai, Ro Encarnacion, Bobbie Chern, Sam Corbett-Davies,
Miranda Bogen, Stevie Bergman, Sharad Goel

SIGDIAL 2022: Guiding the Release of Safer E2E Conversational AI
through Value Sensitive Design
A. Stevie Bergman, Gavin Abercrombie, Shannon Spruit, Dirk Hovy,
Emily Dinan, Y-Lan Boureau, Verena Rieser

ACL 2022: SafetyKit: First Aid for Measuring Safety in
Open-domain Conversational Systems
Emily Dinan, Gavin Abercrombie, A. Stevie Bergman, Shannon Spruit,
Dirk Hovy, Y-Lan Boureau, Verena Rieser

arXiv 2022: Fairness On The Ground: Applying Algorithmic Fairness Approaches to Production Systems
Chloe Bakalar, Renata Barreto, Stevie Bergman, Miranda Bogen, Bobbie Chern, Sam Corbett-Davies, Melissa Hall, Isabel Kloumann, Michelle Lam, Joaquin Quinonero Candela, Manish Raghavan, Joshua Simons, Jonathan Tannen, Edmund Tong, Kate Vredenburgh, Jiejing Zhao


Full list of journal articles available on Google Scholar, including publications in physics.


//////// Education & Physics Research ////////

Doctorate in Physics, Princeton University
Awarded on October 25th, 2019

Spider Collaboration, William C. Jones Lab
Experimental Physics, Observational Cosmology

Measuring the polarization in the cosmic microwave background radiation via launching telescopes on a weather balloon from Antarctica.

We search for a tiny signal - radiation from the early Universe - with a particular statistical signature, buried within instrumental noise and a mountain of astrophysical foregrounds. This work is heavy on both hardware and data analysis, with a bit of cosmology theory.

NSF Graduate Research Fellow, 2015-18
Joseph Henry Merit Prize, 2014

Fulbright Fellow, Indonesia 2013-14
Theoretical physics research at the Institut Teknologi, Bandung.

Assistant Researcher, CERN 2013
  Emlyn Hughes, Columbia University

Smith College, Graduated cum laude, Highest Honors 2009
Bachelor's in Physics, minor Astrophysics

Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi
  Waterman Prize for Outstanding Senior in Physics
JYA, St Edmund Hall, Oxford University
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Caltech
Dean's List


//////// Public Service ////////

Peace Corps Volunteer, Uganda 2011-13
  Science Education Volunteer
  Creator and Co-Founder of Girltech Uganda (Peace Corps page)

Paralegal, US Department of Justice 2009-10
  Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Princeton Physics Climate & Inclusion Committee member, 2018-19

Prison Teaching Initiative, 2016-19

Princeton Citizen Scientists 2016-18
Founding member and a 2017 Day of Action lead


//////// Science & Tech Communication ////////

I've been communicating on science & tech consistently since early 2010, when I started a science, tech, and DC culture/music blog called These Vibes Are Too Cosmic (or The Sidney, for reasons I only vaguely remember). This work continued into the Peace Corps in Uganda as a Science Education volunteer and creator & co-director of GirlTech Uganda, a science & tech professional development camp for Ugandan girls. In graduate school I picked back up the These Vibes title (abbreviated TVR2C) for a weekly science & tech interview show with Brian Kraus on WPRB Princeton 103.3 FM. We continued this show for over 4 years and 100+ interviews. A sampling of those shows are below along with a miniseries podcast I created in 2019, in my final year of my PhD while I was working on my thesis.

All of this, while giving talks on science and tech related topics, and here and there one on applying to graduate school in physics -- all too numerous to remember.

Later, as a research scientist at Facebook then DeepMind, I spend part of my time teaching internally on concepts related to fairness & ethics in AI.

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  Five episode podcast as a primer to the topic of AI & Human Rights, framed by the Princeton Center for Information and Technology Policy/UN Conference Social Protection by Artificial Intelligence: Decoding Human Rights in a Digital Age
Listen on Apple, Spotify, or Soundcloud.


Creator and Co-Host, These Vibes Are Too Cosmic, 2015-19
  Airs on WPRB Princeton 103.3 FM
  Weekly science show featuring expert interviews from across science and tech. All full streams of past shows are in the backcatalogue.

Sampling of Shows:

  Interview with Ruha Benjamin on Power and Manipulation
at the Interface of Tech and Society

  Interviews with Edward Felten on Policy and Tech and Electronic Voting

  Interview with Annette Zimmerman on Algorithmic Injustice

  Interview with Bendert Zevenbergen on the Power Dynamics and
Ethical Frameworks in AI and the Internet

  Interview with Joseph Amon on Health and Human Rights

  Interviews with Sam Wang on Gerrymandering and Stats (Show 1 and Show 2)

  Interview with Alexander Ploss on Research in Infectious
Diseases and It's Global Importance

  Interview with Sébastien Phillipe on Nuclear Arms Verification and Disarmament

//////// Educational Resources ////////

Applying to Graduate School in Physics
Detailed PowerPoint, full of links and resources.

Video Series on Uncertainty Analysis
Designed to augment Physics 101/102 curriculum.
Coming out soon as YouTube series.

Vast science outreach experience.

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Papers   //  CV   //   Twitter: @TVR2C