Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode (Jan 18, 2017)

A lot of the coverage of the lack of diversity in the tech industry focuses on employment and the lack of opportunities and barriers to entry for minorities and women. In other words, the focus is on the negative impact on those who would like to work in the industry. But this article highlights one of what I’d argue are many practical reasons why this lack of diversity is also bad from a product perspective – less diverse teams produce products which are poorer at meeting the needs of a diverse base of users. In this case, the specific issue is face recognition software and its inability to effectively recognize darker faces, in part because it tends to be trained on data sets of largely white faces and tested by mostly white engineers.

via Most engineers are white — and so are the faces they use to train software – Recode

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