"Women Take on the Digital Divide" – A Six-Part Public Event Series

Computer vision has ceased to be a purely academic endeavor. From law enforcement, to border control, to employment, healthcare diagnostics, and assigning trust scores, computer vision systems are being rapidly integrated into all aspects of society.

Gender Shades showed that commercial gender classification systems have high disparities in error rates by skin-type and gender, and other works discuss the harms caused by the mere existence of automatic gender recognition systems. Recent papers have also exposed shockingly racist and sexist labels in popular computer vision datasets--resulting in the removal of some.

However, today, in research, there are works that purport to determine a person’s sexuality from their social network profile images, and others that claim to classify “violent individuals” from drone footage. A critical public discourse surrounding the use of computer-vision based technologies has been mounting. The use of facial recognition technologies by policing agencies has been heavily critiqued and, in response, companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM have pulled or paused their facial recognition software services.

In this talk, Dr. Timnit Gebru will highlight some of the issues and proposed solutions to mitigate bias, as well as how some of the proposed fixes could exacerbate the problem rather than mitigate it.

with:

Dr. Timnit Gebru, computer scientist and the technical co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google, Co-Author Gender Shades

Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer, FrauenLoop

Francesca Schmidt , Gunda Werner Institute

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