Rise25

Stella Biderman is the Executive Director of EleutherAI and a leading figure in the open source AI movement. Her work creating models like GPT-Neo, GPT-NeoX-20B, BLOOM, VQGAN-CLIP, and OpenFold paved the way for the current boom in open source generative AI. In addition to releasing models, Stella’s team builds and releases key pieces of the language modeling pipeline that are often kept proprietary including datasets, training libraries, and evaluation libraries. Her latest models, called Pythia, set a new bar for reproducibility and empowering low-compute users to do research in interpretability, learning dynamics, and more by releasing over 140 checkpoints saved throughout training.

After teaching at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Roberto Di Cosmo became a full professor of Computer Science at University Paris Cité. He is currently on leave at Inria, where he co-founded leads Software Heritage, the library of source code dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing all publicly available software source code, in partnership with UNESCO.

Roberto’s research spans logical systems, functional and parallel programming, and software engineering. A long-time advocate for Free and Open Source Software, he founded the Free Software thematic group of Systematic in 2007, directed the European project Mancoosi to improve package managers for large software collections, and established Irill, a research structure focused on Free and Open-Source Software quality.

He also leads the Software college of the French committee for Open Science, working to make software development a fully recognized academic activity.

Aaron Gokaslan is a PhD student at Cornell Tech, focusing on data, systems, and applications for generative models under the guidance of Volodymyr Kuleshov. He collaborates closely with Noah Snavely, Sasha Rush, and James Grimmelmann. His research aims to keep generative model development open, accessible, and reproducible. Aaron has also published work on embodied AI, graphics, robotics, and 3D vision. He has worked on widely-used open source projects including OpenWebText, ROOTS, CommonCatalog, BLOOM, DBRX, TADNE, and Caduceus, which have collectively been downloaded by millions. His contributions have earned him a Community Contributor Award at PyTorchCon from the Linux Foundation for maintaining libraries like pybind11, habitat-sim, and Pytorch. Aaron serves on the advisory boards of Fidutam and EncodeJustice and also advocates for open-source AI as legislation begins to regulate the field.

Raesetje Sefala is an AI Research Fellow at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) institute. Her research focuses on creating ground truth datasets and using machine learning and other computational social science techniques to study the effects of spatial apartheid in South Africa, post-Apartheid. Her previous work involved partnering with various stakeholders and using machine learning techniques to study poverty and traffic safety in the urban parts of Nigeria and Jakarta, respectively. She is also the co-founder of ACVSS, an annual computer vision summer school that aims to unite African students with leading experts, teaching them fundamental principles, ethical considerations, and cutting-edge techniques.

Kathleen Siminyu is a Mozilla Common Voice fellow alum and a Natural Language Processing researcher at the DAIR Institute. She focuses her research on African languages as a form of activism and from a desire to see these languages better represented on digital platforms. Kathleen is a former Mozilla Common Voice fellow and has been involved in various efforts to build language datasets. Her experiences in building open datasets has inspired a desire to explore data governance and licensing models that can ensure maximum benefit is returned to the communities of dataset builders and subjects.

Kathleen also works with African AI communities to enable ecosystem capacity building and research relevant to Africa. She continues to organize with communities as part of the Deep Learning Indaba, where she is a trustee and the Masakhane Research Foundation, where she is a director.