Is Your Computer Sexist?

In an era when the nation's president-elect has been routinely criticized for his sexist remarks about women, BU researchers, working with Microsoft colleagues, have discovered your computer itself may be sexist. Or rather, they've discovered that the biased data we fallible humans feed into computers can lead the machines to regurgitate our bias. And there are potential real-world consequences from that. Those findings are in a paper produced by the team, whose two BU members are Venkatesh Saligrama, a College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems engineering, with a College of Arts & Sciences computer science appointment, and Tolga Bolukbasi (ENG'18). The team studied word embeddings--algorithms that one member of the team described to National Public Radio as dictionaries for computers.