Researchers combat gender and racial bias in artificial intelligence

FILE PHOTO: The Google logo is shown reflected on an adjacent office building in Irvine, California, U.S. August 7, 2017. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo

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 US. 

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 colour.