Thinkers Timeline

Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929-1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer whose innovations transformed how tall buildings are designed and made the modern generation of skyscrapers possible. He was born in Dhaka, then part of British India and later the capital of Bangladesh, to a family of educators. His father was a mathematics teacher who later became director of public instruction for East Bengal. Khan studied civil engineering at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta and at Dhaka University. In 1952 he travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, earning two master's degrees and a doctorate at the University of Illinois by 1955. He joined the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, where he spent his entire career and became a partner in 1966. Working closely with architects including Bruce Graham, he designed two of the most important skyscrapers of the twentieth century: the John Hancock Center, completed in 1969, and the Sears Tower, completed in 1973 and the world's tallest building for twenty-five years. He also designed Hajj Terminal at Jeddah airport, one of the largest fabric roof structures in the world. He died of a heart attack in Saudi Arabia in 1982, at only fifty-three. His tubular design systems and his broader philosophy of structural efficiency have become the foundation on which nearly every tall building built since has been constructed.

Timnit Gebru is an Ethiopian-American computer scientist. She is one of the most important researchers in the field of AI ethics. Her work has shown how artificial intelligence systems can encode and amplify racial bias, gender bias, and other forms of harm. She was born in 1982 or 1983 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She came to the United States as a teenage refugee. Her family fled Ethiopia after political violence affected her brothers. She arrived in the US in 2001 and faced typical refugee challenges. She did her undergraduate work at Stanford University in electrical engineering. She earned a PhD at the Stanford AI Lab in 2017, studying under the leading computer vision researcher Fei-Fei Li. Her doctoral work used Google Street View images to predict demographic and political patterns from cars in different neighbourhoods. The research drew attention. After her PhD, she did postdoctoral work at Microsoft Research, then joined Google in 2018. She co-led Google's Ethical AI team alongside Margaret Mitchell. In 2020, Gebru and her colleagues drafted a research paper about the risks of large language models, then a new technology. The paper, often called the Stochastic Parrots paper, argued that very large AI language systems carried serious risks. Google ordered her to retract the paper or remove her name. She refused. Google fired her, though Google described the departure differently. The firing caused a major public controversy. Many researchers signed petitions in her support. Several Google researchers later resigned in protest. In 2021 she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), an independent research lab focused on AI ethics. She has continued speaking publicly about harms in AI systems. She has become one of the most visible critics of how the technology industry develops AI.