AI Talent Spotlight: Dr. Deborah Duong, AI Researcher, SingularityNET
In the first of a series of interviews with our team members, we speak to AI Researcher Dr. Deborah Duong, more affectionately known as Debbie to find out what it means for her to be part of SingularityNET, her hope for more women to join the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) industries and her aspirations for the benevolent evolution of AI development.
Please tell us us a bit more about who you are and your “why”.
I will try to share my individual experiences in the hope of encouraging more women into the field. I have different motivations than many others who join the field of AI, like playing games, science fiction, or living forever. I have more of a holistic bent, which I feel is more common in women. It saddens me that when I was in college, a higher percentage of Computer Science majors were women than now.
How did your journey to challenge the status quo in the industry begin?
My love of the sciences came from my dad, a first generation immigrant from Greece and a ballroom dancing instructor. With Greek pride, he told his three daughters that Greeks were the first to ask, “Why?” This made curiosity and truth central to my identity. I grew to love science, particularly NASA’s moon landing. I begged my parents to take me to the Naval Observatory in DC. When they finally did, the only women I saw working there were secretaries taking care of the clocks! I told my parents, “I want to be a secretary when I grow up!” just to be near telescopes and “I want to be a medical technologist” to work with microscopes. Later, as a teenager I was active in the womens movement which inspired me to be a scientist.
How did you then gravitate towards AI?
In college, I studied Anthropology, Sociology and Biology to understand nature where I came across the simulation of ecologies. To simulate the Gaia of the social world, I double majored in Computer Science / Mathematics in the last year of college. This was a time when women had their kids young and I had two children before moving to Birmingham, Alabama following my husband to his optometry program. There, I programmed at the vision science research center, where I learnt about Neural Networks. I applied to graduate school thinking that connectionism was the route to simulating the social world’s Gaia. In 1991, when I was pregnant with my third child, from my master’s thesis came the world’s first adaptive agent based social simulation. In 1995, my simulation was published in the journal, Behavioral Science.
As a sought-after individual in the field, you must have had many exciting opportunities. How did you eventually come across SingularityNET?
I met Ben while doing Natural Language Processing (NLP) contracting in the DC area 15 years ago, before I got my PhD. We talked a lot about AI and had similar opinions. We even seemed to follow the same Goddess! (just kidding). Ben saw connections between things that few others saw. Our common foundation in self- organization and complex adaptive systems made SingularityNET a perfect fit for me, no persuasion needed!
A serendipitous connection indeed! Was there anything else that attracted you to SingularityNET?
It was and is idealism. I agree with SingularityNET’s DNA of social responsibility and democracy — that the solution to today’s problems like growing monopolies is through distributed autonomous organizations in blockchains and AI. We are running out of time to mount a defense! Most of all, I seek truth through AI untethered by the need for immediate profits regardless of social effects. I still believe that one can make a living by working hard at doing good.
It’s heartening to hear that your ideals continues to manifest through your work. Could you share a bit more about what you are presently working on?
I am happy to be working on the SingularityNET Gym, a simulation of the SingularityNET. It is an ecosystem of agents that construct and trade Python programs using fake AGI tokens in a market. It is a gym of cooperating, coevolving agents that is as advanced as developments from Google and OpenAI, but with more attention to the social science of agent cooperation. Also, instead of a game, our gym is doing something very useful by creating practical solutions in Python. As a democratic meritocracy, anyone in the community can contribute. Solutions can take the form of an ensemble of different methods of assembling solutions, each from a member of the community.
And in your quest to make AI more accessible, have you found allies in your team?
I certainly have! I lead the Network Analytics group, where we apply tools like simulation, graph analytics, NLP and causal neural networks to networked datasets including political corruption, Ethereum transactions and the output of the SingularityNET simulation. Everyone works together to support each other towards our goals. People in other groups contribute new data and ideas that involve the community. Advances in AI are better served by a community where everyone is encouraged to invent, rather than a hierarchy where only a few dictate the trajectory.
With such positive support, how has it been like working at SingularityNET?
People here are both smart and nice. Usually, it can be hard to get across ideas that you have been developing for decades, but these people not only get it, they appreciate it. Personally, all I see are opportunities, the kind that encourages me to put my all into my work because I know that people will recognize a job well done. I like it that way.
Do you see AI organizations like SingularityNET becoming a platform for social change?
Absolutely! This is the critical time for finding exactly how this can emerge. It is our job to fight irresponsible AI that is not transparent and sneakily tries to take advantage of people, with socially responsible AI that makes plain the social implications of its algorithms. Thankfully, the decentralized AI embodied in SingularityNET is more powerful than corporate hierarchy based AI.
How do you feel this common set of ideals impacts talent acquisition as a whole for the organization and the tech industry?
I feel that SingularityNET can and will acquire and work with talent at a far greater rate than traditional tech companies, which don’t seem to know what constitutes a broadly talented, interdisciplinary, and creative individual in their hiring practices. They are the corporate equivalent of teaching to the test: even if their leaders did graduate from Montessori, their HR departments don’t seem to be aware of the value of creativity in hiring workers. I think this leads to a narrow-minded, even selfish, hacker culture in the tech industry, that is not open to women.
What would you say to anyone interested in becoming involved with SingularityNET?
Be broad, because everything is relevant. Untether yourself from what passes as knowledge and seek truth on your own. Don’t care about what others think of you. Work hard, learn a lot, take advantage of the resources on the internet, but don’t let yourself get addicted to anything, play the long game and be patient. Free your mind to explore. Focus on advancing knowledge. You will find your excellence and people will eventually notice.
With similar wisdom and to end on a fun note, please tell us what your favorite type of pizza would be?
I like greasy old school pan pizza with everything on it, but I actually eat New York style cheese. I’m always eager to connect with our community members and love the passion and energy that they bring to the community.
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