Sky Sheng
Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow, MDS Vancouver
“AI can help us move fast, but not always in the right direction. In MDS, we teach students not only how to build a model, but also when to stop and ask, should we? Data is never just about numbers. Behind it are people, and sometimes animals, who don't get a say in how it's used. Every dataset tells a story, and part of our job is noticing whose story is missing.”
Sky grew up in Yantai, a coastal city in China. She obtained her bachelor's degree from America’s dairyland, the University of Wisconsin–Madison. During her PhD at the University of British Columbia, she built automated systems to monitor dairy cow behaviours, who their friends are, who they compete with, and when they might be getting sick. Along the way, she started asking harder questions about the tools themselves. Her AI fairness research, presented at ACM FAccT, showed how generative AI can erase controversial realities like intensive livestock farming. To Sky, AI is a mirror held up to society. It reflects the values and knowledge of the people who build it, including their best qualities and blind spots. In her teaching, Sky loves using visualization and storytelling to make complicated concepts simple and fun to learn. She hopes to empower students from diverse backgrounds to use data science to solve problems that matter.