AIID Blog

RAIC Holds First All-Hands Meeting

Posted 2022-07-20 by Janet Schwartz.

We are excited to share with our community of AI safety-minded collaborators that the Responsible AI Collaborative (RAIC) reached full staffing on Tuesday, July 12, with our first virtual all-hands staff meeting. Founder Sean McGregor welcomed the group hailing from California, Rhode Island, Uruguay, and Vietnam by recognizing that “we are already a global operation” and making a call to action for RAIC to make the world a better place by ensuring difficult lessons regarding the limits of AI are not repeatedly experienced around the world.

RAIC is the new non-profit behind the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database (AIID) and will be presenting critical safety and social issues through incidents to learn from the past and inspire positive change in the fast-growing AI sector.

During the meeting, Sean emphasized RAIC’s spirit of openness and global collaboration. In this spirit, one of the first features the team is working on is machine translation of incidents into multiple languages. Other initial projects include building out a taxonomy for incidents, promoting prevention and mitigation resources alongside incidents, and leveraging natural language processing to monitor for potential new incidents and associate them with existing incidents as appropriate.

While the AIID is now staffed with a team of full and part time people working to build the foundation of global AI incident sharing, the project remains open source and collaborative. The organization's Slack installation has grown to 26 people by word of mouth. If you would like an invite, please reach out.

In addition to RAIC’s initial 7 person staff, we are also pleased to announce longtime AIID volunteer Neama Dadkhahnikoo now holds the title of Executive Director. Neama is an expert in artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship, with over 15 years of experience in technology development at startups, non profits, and enterprises. Neama will be responsible for RAIC entity and product leadership.

The meeting wrapped up with a discussion about why this work matters, and how RAIC can have a direct impact on people’s lives by preventing future AI harms. In its founding, RAIC will answer Santayana’s aphorism “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”… with data.

Full and part time staff include: