Karen Hao is an artificial intelligence reporter for MIT Technology Review. Hao’s focus is on the ethics and social impact of AI, as well as its applications for social good. She identifies herself as a tech reporter, experimental storyteller, and engineer. She is beyond what she claims herself.

Hao dedicates her work to improving information about artificial intelligence technology. After she graduated from MIT with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Energy Studies, she worked as a reporter and data scientist at Quartz, a digital news site, and before that she worked as an application engineer at the first startup to spin out of Google X. At the same time, her weekly newsletter “The Algorithm” was named one of the best newsletters on the internet by The Webby Awards in 2019.  

Karen best sums up about the research in AI and the impact it has on communities in the following quote: “The research community in AI is extremely global and extremely open. The community has always been founded on the idea of open collaboration, open-sourcing, and a lot of the advancements that are currently happening right now or that we already see the products of from advancements prior came from significant collaboration across borders, particularly among American scientists and other scientists who immigrated to the US and work at American universities or Chinese scientists and American scientists at some of the biggest tech giants in the world.”

As Karen stated, the research community in AI is now extremely open. Karen is a representative of a global technology worker. She is a native speaker in both Chinese and English which provide her more opportunity in the research community in AI. She set up examples for not only American students who dreamed about contributing to the field but also for all the young females, international students who are passionate about joining the community in the future.