Re:AI researcher Timnit Gebru resigns from Google
by academia_hack on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:07AM
(#25303005)
The back channel theory sounds like a good point to me. Anonymous peer review is largely a charade, I'd be more surprised if Google didn't have fingers on the scales and flies on the wall at top ML venues than if they did. It's very possible that the leak/breach of anonymity is what kicked off her demands to get the names of people who filed complaints that led to the paper's retraction.
This is pure speculation, but it looks like there may have been some additional backchannel from the conference reviewers to their buddies at Google that caused a follow-on sensitivity or objection later from other functions at Google, namely PR & Policy (based on her tweets), which may have been why Timnit was super curious about the identity of the feedback authors.