from Hacker News

How white engineers built racist code – and why it's dangerous for black people

by kafkaesq on 12/4/17, 3:23 PM with 1 comments

  • by ImSkeptical on 12/4/17, 5:09 PM

    >facial recognition software has problems recognizing black faces because its algorithms are usually written by white engineers

    That quote doesn't seem right to me.

    I think the basic premise - that facial recognition typically doesn't work as well with black people, apparently backed up with research from the FBI, is a critical thing to know and work on. I don't think the explanation is that software engineers responsible are disproportionately white or racist, but rather that the networks need to be trained with datasets including more people of different races. For example, neural networks can recognize species of birds, and that advance was not delayed by a dearth of avian engineers.