Amazon receives challenge from face recognition researcher over biased AI

Her research has uncovered racial and gender bias in facial analysis tools sold by companies such as Amazon that have a hard time recognizing certain faces, especially darker-skinned women. Buolamwini holds a white mask she had to use so that software could detect her face. Facial recognition technology was already seeping into everyday life -- from your photos on Facebook to police scans of mugshots -- when Joy Buolamwini noticed a serious glitch: Some of the software couldn't detect dark-skinned faces like hers. That revelation sparked the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher to launch a project that's having an outsize influence on the debate over how artificial intelligence should be deployed in the real world. Her tests on software created by brand-name tech firms such as Amazon uncovered much higher error rates in classifying the gender of darker-skinned women than for lighter-skinned men.