Re:Google Has a Striking History of Bias Against Black Girls
by charlescearl on Thursday March 29, 2018 @09:36AM
(#16706887)
Perhaps, but I doubt it.
As one anecdote, http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a... reports facial recognition algorithm performance on darker-skinned women up to 30% lower than lighter-skinned men. The preliminary results were reported to Google, IBM, and Facebook. IBM was able to tune its algorithm achieve comparable scoring across all skin hues/genders within a week (according to my notes from the talk). It could be that search on that scale is much harder than facial recognition, and its also that a quick fix would introduce other errors, I'm sure it's an NP-complete problem, yada yada.
Yes the society is racist, but then the U.S. enacted the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th amendments to address extreme racism and gender discrimination. That is, citizens -- responsible engineers and data scientists among them -- can take it as their obligation to confront systemic racism. Yes, Klansmen are racist, Nazis are racist, but we don't have to accept genocide -- we don't even have to accept biased, discriminatory and derogatory internet services either.
As one anecdote, http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a... reports facial recognition algorithm performance on darker-skinned women up to 30% lower than lighter-skinned men. The preliminary results were reported to Google, IBM, and Facebook. IBM was able to tune its algorithm achieve comparable scoring across all skin hues/genders within a week (according to my notes from the talk). It could be that search on that scale is much harder than facial recognition, and its also that a quick fix would introduce other errors, I'm sure it's an NP-complete problem, yada yada.
But Google and racialized search is not a new issue https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/onlineads/1071-1.pdf.
Yes the society is racist, but then the U.S. enacted the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th amendments to address extreme racism and gender discrimination. That is, citizens -- responsible engineers and data scientists among them -- can take it as their obligation to confront systemic racism. Yes, Klansmen are racist, Nazis are racist, but we don't have to accept genocide -- we don't even have to accept biased, discriminatory and derogatory internet services either.