Serpentine Galleries - 2024
In celebration of his exhibition, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, Refik Anadol will be in conversation with Mira Lane, Senior Director, Technology and Society, Google and Doug Eck, Senior Research Director, Google DeepMind. Moderated by Kay Watson, Head of Arts Technologies, Serpentine and introduced by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine, the panel will explore the ways in which technology alters our perception of the natural world and our experience of time and space.
Dialogues on Technology & Society - 2023
Join Mira Lane, Senior Director of Technology & Society at Google, in an inspiring conversation with National Geographic photographer and filmmaker Ami Vitale that explores the power of storytelling, how technology and AI are helping to advance conservation, and the importance of hope in addressing global challenges.
Google Keyword - 2023
Exploring data, storytelling and how artists are using AI as a creative tool, Refik and I also discussed what it means to be an artist in the age of AI. For Refik, data can be used as a primary material and AI, a “thinking brush,” empowering his radical visualizations to expand the possibilities of art.
Dialogues on Technology & Society - 2023
Watch renowned media artist and Director of Refik Anadol Studio, Refik Anadol as he engages in a thought-provoking conversation about the transformative power of AI in the realm of creativity with Mira Lane, Senior Director of Technology & Society at Google.
The Atlantic: Dialogues on AI, Society, and What Comes Next - 2023
Working at the crossroads of technology and imagination, this is how two artists at Google envision the future of AI-driven art.
LinkedIn - 2023
Ideas are more than mere thoughts; they are the catalysts of our civilization, and the connective threads that weave the rich tapestry of human history. Ideas bridge the gap between generations, between disciplines, and they shape our collective narrative. These are the reflections I was left with after last weekend's incredible gathering at #SciFoo.
The Information - 2023
Google has hired Mira Lane, a longtime Microsoft executive who specializes in the ethics of artificial intelligence, to join its team focused on technology and society. The move, which Lane confirmed, comes as Google and the tech industry at large grapple with the ethical implications of increasingly sophisticated AI models.
In AI We Trust (podcast) - 2022
Mira Lane, a a polymath, technologist and artist, is the head of Ethics & Society at Microsoft, a multidisciplinary group responsible for guiding AI innovation that leads to ethical, responsible, and sustainable outcomes. In this episode, she shares how the culture at Microsoft includes compassion in AI development to the benefit of their AI products, how she changes the perception of responsible AI from a tax to a value-add and how games can play a role in achieving this goal.
World Economic Forum - 2021
The World Economic Forum Responsible Use of Technology project aims to provide practical resources for organizations to operationalize ethics in technology. This White Paper, with its focus on Microsoft Corporation, highlights tools and processes that facilitate responsible technology product design and development. The document is the first in a series that seeks to investigate how companies have begun to incorporate ethical thinking into the development of technology. Its lessons can help organizations advance their own responsible innovation practices, and may even inspire others that have created new methods in pursuit of ethical technology to share their work, either in this series or elsewhere.
Peace Innovation Podcast - 2021
In this episode, Margarita sits down with Partner Director of Ethics & Society within #AI at Microsoft, Mira Lane. Mira started her Ethics & Society team in 2017, motivated by a sense of deep responsibility in the tech work that she was doing with Microsoft.
Throughout this riveting conversation, Mira and Margarita discuss designing the future we want to live in through current #ethicaltech and #ethicalbusiness. They touch on the process of ethical #auditing from the beginning of product development as an ingrained framework rather than an afterthought.
Microsoft - The AI Blog - 2020
Mira Lane, the lead of Microsoft’s Ethics & Society team, is charged with ensuring that the principles articulated at the highest levels of the company to guide the responsible use of AI find their way into the heads of researchers conducting user testing and the hands of engineers writing code. It starts with asking the right questions, she said.
Her team of philosophers, engineers, security experts, designers and trainers works closely with product teams to consider what data or models should be used, who might be directly or indirectly affected by a new technology, what kinds of people should be interviewed to identify unintentional harms and how those insights can be folded into product design.
“The thing that we’re trying to do is help people design technology in a really intentional way, so you really understand what the effects of the tech are and can look around the corner to how it might be used or misused,” Lane said.
Medium - 2020
As the leader of the Ethics & Society organization at Microsoft, I believe that responsible innovation is the next critical wave of design thinking. Traditional design schools don’t teach ethics, and people often don’t consider ethics a design problem. Today’s technologies are exciting and present tremendous opportunities to augment human abilities across a range of scenarios. At the same time, technologies without appropriate grounding in human-centered thinking, or appropriate mitigations and controls, present considerable challenges. These technologies have potential to injure people, undermine our democracies, and even erode human rights — and they’re growing in complexity, power, and ubiquity.
TechCrunch - 2019
“We’re incredibly excited to support this open call for ways in which technology can help art institutions engage new audiences,” says Mira Lane, partner director Ethics & Society at Microsoft. “We strongly believe that immersive technology can enhance the ability for richer experiences, deeper storytelling, and broader engagement.”
Cornell Chronicle - 2019
The Jenny Sabin Studio team includes Dillon Pranger, M.Arch. ’15, project manager; John Hilla, designer; Jeremy Bilotti ’18, designer; and William Qian ’19, designer. The Microsoft Research team is Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research; Asta Roseway and Mira Lane, co-founders of the artist-in-residence program; Daniel McDuff, researcher; Jonathan Lester, engineer; and Wende Copfer, creative director.
Microsoft Research Faculty Summit - 2019
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and mixed reality have the potential to upend the way we create, work, and interact with one another. This disruption is an opportunity and a challenge. As we see technologies begin to closely replicate aspects of creative human output, we must consider the evolution of work and our relationship to machines. New technologies alter our connections with one other, they have the potential to rapidly turn our ideas into tangibles, and yet… we all know that we must tread intentionally in this new era. Should we aim for more ambitious relationships between computers and ourselves and what does responsible innovation mean in a future of human-machine collaboration?
Fortune - 2019
Big tech has a far-from-sparkling record when it comes to hiring a diverse workforce — and that’s a problem that could bleed into the future. The reason? Without more women and people of color driving the development of artificial intelligence, the results that the technology will spit back out will be, to put it mildly, problematic.
Stanford Human- Centered AI - Fall Conference - 2019
Johannes Himmelreich, Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration and International Affairs, Syracuse University
Nien-hê Hsieh, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard
Mira Lane, Partner Director, Ethics & Society, Microsoft
Jake Metcalf, Researcher, Data & Society
Irina Raicu, Director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Kate Vredenburgh, Postdoctoral Fellow, McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University
Fast Company - 2019
Every year, Fast Company’s Innovation By Design Awards honor the best design in business, from products to buildings to UX. This year, we received more than 4,300 entries—a record—and the 22 winners and 483 honorees, selected by a roster of experts from across the design world, represent the best work from an immensely competitive group.
VentureBeat - 2019
In a public meeting attended by VentureBeat this spring in Silicon Valley, AI experts and people opposed to lethal autonomous robots shared their opinions about potential ethical challenges the Pentagon and U.S. servicemembers might face, such as improvements to object detection or weapon targeting systems. At that time, Microsoft director of ethics and society Mira Lane and others recognized the potential lack of moral hangups by U.S. adversaries, but that the U.S. military can play a big role in defining how and how not to use AI in the future.
C4ISRNET - 2018
“There is no such thing as just introducing new technology,” said Mira Lane, head of ethics and society at Microsoft. After outlining the limitations of programmers to anticipate all that their code will produce, and the ways in which wartime necessity might alter the design of autonomous weapon systems, Lane emphasized the importance of developing tight iteration loops and feedback systems in AI to spot flaws early and allow for rapid mitigation and adaptation.
“With every new development of technology, the emergence of new domains of ignorance is inevitable and predictable,” said Lane.
ILIFF School of Theology - 2019
Mira will lead us in a discussion of the role of creativity in design. Mira’s use of the creative potential of neural networks in her art to foreground different perspectives intersects with Iliff’s long commitment to innovation and difference. More specifically, Iliff’s AI Institute is also using neural networks to bring different perspectives into online learning spaces.
ILIFF School of Theology - 2019
Mira Lane, Partner Director of Ethics and Society for Cloud and AI at Microsoft will lead a workshop in applying values frameworks to the development of AI applications. Mira will provide a snapshot of the current landscape regarding responsible AI design and deployment. Then, as a case study workshop, she will apply her values framework methodologies to the AI tutor application being developed by the AI institute @ Iliff. We will then have a large group discussion about the importance of trust-based practices in the whole lifecycle of AI development. We will explore questions such as:
How do we identify potential unintended consequences in AI deployment?
What do user centered approaches to AI design look like?
How can we increase transparency in AI development?
Podcast: This Week in Machine Learning and AI - 2019
Mira and I focus our conversation on the role of culture and human-centered design in AI. We discuss how Mira defines human-centered design, its connections to culture and responsible innovation, and how these ideas can be scalably implemented across large engineering organizations.
Puget Sound Business Journal - 2019
Mira Lane says its wrong to hoard all of your ethical developments within your company if they could benefit the entire tech industry.
MSR New England 10th Anniversary Symposium - 2018
This panel will discuss how computer science intersects with issues of fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics. Experts will discuss what these concepts mean in general and in the particular context of systems employing artificial intelligence. The panel is moderated by Hanna Wallach from Microsoft Research New York.
Thomson Reuters - 2018
For Mira Lane of Microsoft, the key to creating ethical artificial intelligence systems starts with asking the right questions.
When it comes to the threats latent in our AI-empowered future, we may owe less to the imagination of James Cameron and more to that of Franz Kafka. Rather than hordes of deadly cyborgs wielding automatic weapons, picture instead a future where a person is arrested for a crime but not told what the crime is, why he was arrested or by whom he was arrested; the more he tries to find answers, the more hopeless the situation becomes. Entertainingly existential absurdity, until it happens to you.
Seattle Design Festival - 2018
“AI tools are quite different,” answered Mira Lane, partner director of Ethics and Society at Microsoft. “When you look at a paintbrush or a camera, as an artist you control that instrument. You don’t wield an AI tool in the same way. There’s more of a dialogue: an artist inputs an idea, the AI produces an output, and the artist responds.”
Lane continued, “AI tools are fundamentally different in that sense, and the work itself is profound because AI has the ability to impersonate and compose. I experimented to see if I could automate some of my creative work, and it was wildly unsatisfying as an artist to have this machine start spitting things out that looked like your work — so I went analog for a while.”
AI4ALL - 2018
AI has the potential to do a lot of good in the world. To make that possible, we need to make sure these technologies are aligned with our moral values and our ethical principles. We need to really deeply understand the data that we’re using to create the foundation of our system, and how the resulting algorithms might impact people and communities that come into contact with them.
The key question is, how do you bring transparency into the AI design, development, and training process? I think it requires a shift in how you would traditionally design and experience technology
Forbes - 2018
Mira Lane, Partner Director of Design, was part of the Hawaii group. “It was a lot of fun to get out of the work environment and into a space where you were not in that mindset. I remember us having discussions about core ideas, then going away for a while and thinking about it. We knew it would evolve over time, but if the core foundation was correct then it would evolve in the right direction ... It was also important to isolate the groups so you could run quickly. Having that trust between us was so valuable that we didn't worry about what the engineers were doing.”
The Verge - 2017
“We brought these big chart papers with us... and covered the outside of Brian’s house”, explains Mira Lane, a UX designer on Microsoft Teams. ‘We really used the environment and were sat down brainstorming every day.’ The team in Hawaii even plucked eggs together at the farm, went on hikes, and participated in ad-hoc yoga sessions. These offsites were clearly great team-bonding sessions, but the remote nature of them helped the teams really switch off and understand what features are needed in modern chat apps.
Financial Times - 2017
Technology helps. As videoconferencing systems have improved, teams can feel more like they are sitting in the same room. Advances in technology make it possible for colleagues to “drop in” casually, says Mira Lane, principal architect for Microsoft Teams, a chat-based tool that makes meetings “open” and visible to the broader group.
Thrive Global - 2017
Early in my career I was in a position that may sound familiar: I was going to work every day but didn’t necessarily have a clear idea of what I wanted my career to be, or how to get there.
TechStars Startup Week Seattle - 2017
As more artificial intelligence systems integrate into lives of diverse users, it is critical to examine who we build for. Learn best practices from leading AI, VR, and AR technologists on building inclusive products to expand user bases, improve customer experience, and avoid embarrassing mishaps when users cannot use products as intended due to biased system training.
Microsoft News - 2016
Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud. Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.
New York Times - 2016
Mira Lane, principal architect of Microsoft Teams, demonstrated how people could spontaneously start videoconferences inside the software if they would rather hash things out face to face. “It’s a really low-friction way of having an ad hoc meeting,” Ms. Lane said.
WinBeta - 2016
Mira Lane, an engineer on the product team for Microsoft Teams, just got offstage at the Office event in New York where Microsoft pulled the wraps off the new chat based workspace for Office 365. Our own Arif Bacchus was able to catch up with her for a brief walkthrough of some of the features of Teams, as you can see here.
GeekWire - 2016
Today Microsoft unveiled its long-awaited Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, which the company bills as a “chat-based workspace in Office 365.” Descriptions of the program, and even the appearance, somewhat reminded us of Yammer. So we asked Mira Lane, UX architect for Microsoft Teams, how Teams and Yammer are different, and how they can co-exist.
PC Magazine - 2016
Mira Lane, the Principal UX Architect of Microsoft Teams, walked me through some of the deeper multimedia customization for power users.
The Next Web - 2013
If you have used the native finance application in Windows 8, for example, you have used Appex code. The team created several applications for Windows 8 that answered a number high-use search queries with dedicated applications. The team thinks of itself as a “North Star” for developers, according to the team’s Mira Lane.
