How External Auditing Is Changing the Facial Recognition Landscape with Deb Raji

EPISODE 388

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About this Episode

Today we're taking a break from our CVPR coverage to bring you this interview with Deb Raji, a Technology Fellow at the AI Now Institute at New York University.

Over the past week or two, there have been quite a few major news stories in the AI community, including the self-imposed moratorium on facial recognition technology from Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. There was also the release of PULSE, a controversial computer vision model that ultimately sparked a Twitter firestorm involving Yann Lecun and AI ethics researchers, including friend of the show, Timnit Gebru. The controversy echoed into the broader AI community, eventually leading to the former's departure from Twitter.

In our conversation with Deb, we dig into both of these stories in-depth, discussing the origins of Deb's work on the Gender Shades project, how subsequent work put a spotlight on the potential harms of facial recognition technology, and who holds responsibility for dealing with underlying bias issues in datasets.

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