Gonville & Caius College Bye Fellow Dr Eleanor Drage has moved from selling ham to leading on equality in artificial intelligence.

Eleanor completed her undergraduate degree in French and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and was poised to take up a place in law school, only to change her mind a day before starting. She then joined a start-up with computer scientists selling Jamón ibérico, Spanish ham, before working for technology companies for two years.

Her academic enthusiasm and interdisciplinary career was revived by a European Commission Horizon project on cultures of equality. Eleanor looked at science fiction by women writers “exploring the trajectory of utopian feminist thinking from 1666 to 2016”. The Planetary Humanism of European Women’s Science Fiction: An Experience of the Impossible, her book published this month, reads six science fiction texts written by women writers though the work of six key gender and race scholars: Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Jack Halberstam.

She has co-created an edited volume of feminist work in the AI space, Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, which was also recently released. The book launch takes place on November 3.

Asked now to sum up her work, Eleanor says: “I apply feminist and anti-racist ideas to make AI better for everyone.”

Eleanor is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where she specialises in applying feminist and anti-racist theory and methods to the development and critique of artificial intelligence. She is Co-Investigator on the €3.8m Desirable Digitalisation project, and Principal Investigator on the In-Depth EU AI Act project, which is creating a free, step-by-step online tool that helps AI companies meet the EU AI Act's obligations. The tool goes beyond mere 'box-ticking' compliance by interpreting the Act's requirements through feminist, anti-racist and disability scholarship. 

Eleanor works closely with Dr Kerry McInerney. The pair have a podcast together, The Good Robot, which has given rise to a forthcoming book, The Good Robot: Feminist Voices on the Future of Technology (Bloomsbury).

The podcast began during the Covid-19 pandemic, interviewing leading thinkers on feminism or pro-justice approaches to technology. 

“Technology isn't neutral,” Eleanor adds. 

“What we are trying to do is show companies that AI design and development involves making political decisions.”

“It's very varied. I think that's what's really amazing about my job. My primary goal is to come up with some good ideas and then change people’s hearts. And bring joy to some of the conversations people don't like having.”