Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow...

Roundup Hello, here's a quick recap on all the latest AI-related news beyond what we've already reported this week. You may have seen news reports that autonomous cars are unlikely to detect pedestrians crossing the road if they have dark skin, and thus run them over. And yes, the internal alarm bells in your head should be going off, as a closer look at the research behind the stories shows all those headlines screaming about racist AI are a little off the mark. The academic paper at the heart of the matter described a series of experiments testing different computer vision models, such as the Faster R-CNN model and R-50-FPN, on images of pedestrians with different skin tones. The study's authors, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, described how they paid humans to look through the collection of roughly 3,500 photos, and individually tag people in the snaps as either "LS" for light skin or "DS" for dark skin, and then trained the neural networks using this dataset.