(Bloomberg) –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 U.S. 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 color.
So earlier this year, Gebru, 34, joined a Microsoft Corp. team called FATE—for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI. The program was set up three years ago to ferret out biases that creep into AI data and can skew results.
