The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. agency responsible for developing technical metrics to promote "innovation and industrial competitiveness," this week published a document outlining feedback and recommendations for mitigating the risk of bias in AI. The paper, about which NIST is accepting comments until August, proposes an approach for identifying and managing "pernicious" biases that can damage public trust in AI. As NIST scientist Reva Schwartz, who coauthored the paper, points out, AI is transformative in its ability to make sense of data more quickly than humans. But as AI pervades the world, it's becoming clear that its predictions can be affected by algorithmic and data biases. Making matters worse, some AI systems are built to model complex concepts that can't be directly measured by data in the first place.