Skip Navigation Skip to Content Skip to Footer

Genevieve Smith awarded United States National Science Foundation (NSF) Award

October 22, 2024

Genevieve Smith, DPhil candidate at Kellogg College has been awarded a United States National Science Foundation (NSF) Award in the ReDDDoT (Responsible Design, Development, & Deployment of Technologies) programme.

The ReDDDoT programme supports research projects that concentrate on the responsible design of technologies. She will be serving as Principal Investigator exploring the promise of open-source foundation models and democratizing AI.

While open-source models can create greater opportunities to “democratize” AI development, for both open and closed models, key decisions such as data the models learn from, transparency provided, and other considerations are currently undemocratic. They are informed by the values and market priorities of their largely for-profit driven creators and managers.

The goal of the project is to integrate broader perspectives and voices in the design and development of large open-source models, including through co-creating a vision for “responsible” open-source models in a workshop run under the Responsible & Equitable AI Initiative (UC Berkeley AI Research Lab) partnering with Mozilla and utilizing participatory design methods. The team will also be creating a research roadmap to move towards this vision.

Genevieve says of her award:

I’m thrilled and honored to receive an NSF Award in the ReDDDoT (Responsible Design, Development, & Deployment of Technologies) program! While open-source models can create greater opportunities to “democratize” AI development, for both open and closed models, key decisions such as data the models learn from, transparency provided, and other considerations are currently undemocratic. They are informed by the values and market priorities of their largely for-profit driven creators and managers. In this project, I seek to explore the promise of democratizing AI by integrating broader perspectives and voices in the design and development of large open-source models by co-creating a vision for “responsible” open source.

We congratulate Genevieve on her achievement and look forward to her continued success in the field as she completes her DPhil in International Development at Oxford.