Specifying a Chinese student's nationality sparkes anger

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A speech by an American scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during a top AI conference last week has sparked anger for comments that specified the Chinese nationality of a university student in an example of misbehaviour.

Rosalind Picard, a professor of health sciences and technology at the MIT Media Lab, was speaking during a keynote speech in Vancouver, Canada on Friday at NeurIPS 2024 – the 38th annual conference on neural information processing systems, during which she highlighted an incident involving a Chinese student who had been expelled.

According to Picard, the student – who was from a well-known school in China – tried to justify using AI for an assignment by explaining that “I did it to make my paper results look better. Nobody at my school taught us morals or values”.

“I was shocked to hear that they thought this was justifiable behaviour there,” Picard told the conference, adding that “most Chinese who I know are extremely honest and morally upright”.

During a Q&A session that followed, a Chinese attendee challenged Picard on her remarks, noting that it was the only time in the entire lecture where she explicitly mentioned nationality in relation to behaviour.

What Picard said “reflected a deeply troubling and racist view of Chinese scholars”, Furong Huang, an associate professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, remarked on social media, adding: “This was not just inappropriate but also profoundly disheartening.”

Huang said that it was entirely unnecessary to mention the student’s nationality when discussing an example of cheating, yet Picard chose to highlight it. “This choice perpetuates harmful stereotypes about Chinese scholars and reflects a broader bias against Asians,” Huang said.

“Racism has no place in academia, and incidents like this tarnish the principles of inclusion and respect that we, as a global research community, should uphold.”

Picard later apologised. In a statement posted on the MIT Media Lab website on Saturday, she said she “regretted” including the nationality in her presentation.

“I see that this was unnecessary, irrelevant to the point I was making, and caused unintended negative associations,” she said. “I apologise for doing this and feel very badly about the distress that this incident has caused.”

Picard’s keynote speech was entitled “How to optimise what matters most?”

The NeurIPS conference organisers also responded quickly, saying that the cultural generalisation “reinforces implicit biases by making generalisations about Chinese scholars”. “This is not what NeurIPS stands for,” the organiser said in a statement on social media.

According to the MIT Media Lab information, Picard is a scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, author and engineer.

She is best known for her book Affective Computing, which proposed and described how to give computers emotional intelligence capabilities, including voice assistants, robots and agents, among other interactive technologies.

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