Researchers Combat Gender and Racial Bias in Artificial Intelligence

When Timnit Gebru was a student at Stanford University's prestigious Artificial Intelligence Lab, she ran a project that used Google Street View images of cars to determine the demographic makeup of towns and cities across the U.S. While the AI algorithms did a credible job of predicting income levels and political leanings in a given area, Gebru says her work was susceptible to bias--racial, gender, socio-economic. She was also horrified by a ProPublica report that found a computer program widely used to predict whether a criminal will re-offend discriminated against people of color. So earlier this year, Gebru, 34, joined a Microsoft Corp. team called FATE--for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI. The program was set up three years ago to ferret out biases that creep into AI data and can skew results.