Sarah Bird
Chief Product Officer of Responsible AI
Dr. Sarah Bird leads a team that works across Microsoft to help make AI systems trustworthy — both for the company and for customers building with AI — by surfacing emerging risks, creating ways to test for them and building mitigations and controls to help build AI systems responsibly.
An expert in responsible AI implementation, Bird has helped teams develop and ship major AI products responsibly, including GitHub Copilot and Microsoft’s Copilot, bringing together the right mix of research, product and policy to translate responsible AI principles into real-world engineering practices. Bird was one of the founding researchers in the Microsoft FATE research group and contributed to the creation of the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard.
Bird is an active contributor to the open-source ecosystem; she led the product development of responsible AI tools including ONNX, Fairlearn and PyTorch 1.0. More recently, she and her team released ASSERT, an open-source tool to automate AI safety evaluations, and Agent Control Specification, an open-source standard to regulate agent controls.
Before joining Microsoft, Bird was a founding member of the AI ethics group at Meta (formerly Facebook). She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was advised by Turing Award winner Dave Patterson as well as Krste Asanović and Burton Smith.
Bird also serves as site lead for Microsoft’s New York engineering and research division, where she is dedicated to fostering tech innovation in the city. She is passionate about mentorship and increasing diversity in the field of responsible AI.
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