10-13-2024 W2W - Flipbook - Page 22
PHOTO BY KARL MERTON FERRON
Gabriella Waters
48, Director, Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab (CoNA Lab) at the Center for Equitable AI
and Machine Learning Systems at Morgan State University
Gabriella Waters sees artificial intelligence as
a change agent for good. “My whole ethos is it’s
meant to be a democratizing agent,” says the director of Morgan State’s Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab (CoNA) at the Center for Equitable AI
and Machine Learning Systems. The lab employs
AI researchers, neuroscientists, psychologists and
engineers to study AI and the intersections of cognition and neurodiversity, a term referring to how
people’s brains interpret information differently
and interact with the world around them.
The lab is researching cognitive digital twins,
a kind of AI-powered computer simulation that
allows scientists to replicate something in the real
22 | 2024 | WOMEN TO WATCH
world, to eradicate bias in data collection. “Most
AI that are trained have biases,” Waters says. “It
costs money to obtain that data and preprocess it
and clean it up.” Another project the lab is working
on is an AI-powered platform to improve access
for people with disabilities. Those two projects
are indicative of Waters’s philosophy on AI, which
she sees as a tool to “augment, not supplant human
capability.”
“Right now, everything is driven by profit and
humans are an afterthought,” she says. “But if we
research it in that (democratizing) way, we can be
better.”
— Lia Russell