MIT Technology Review

Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order

An MIT Technology Review series investigates how AI is enriching a powerful few by dispossessing communities that have been dispossessed before.

Racism is baked into patent systems

Intellectual-property laws imagine creatorship as white, a book argues. By Shobita Parthasarathy

Brookings

The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows racism has no boundaries

The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows racism has no boundaries as Ukrainian refugees of African descent are being turned away at border crossings in favor of white Ukrainians.

the Guardian

Ukraine crisis latest news: Kyiv urges EU to provide air-defences as Russia invades on multiple fronts

Latest updates: Ukraine also calls for ‘fiercest restrictions’ against Belarus; former Ukraine defence minister says Russian troops trying to get to Kyiv

Frontiers

Multidimensional Face Representation in a Deep Convolutional Neural Network Reveals the Mechanism Underlying AI Racism

The increasingly popular application of AI runs the risk of amplifying social bias, such as classifying non-white faces as animals. Recent research has largely attributed this bias to the training data implemented. However, the underlying mechanism is poorly understood; therefore, strategies to rectify the bias are unresolved. Here, we examined a typical deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), VGG-Face, which was trained with a face dataset consisting of more white faces than black and Asian faces. The transfer learning result showed significantly better performance in identifying white faces, similar to the well-known social bias in humans, the other-race effect (ORE). To test whether the effect resulted from the imbalance of face images, we retrained the VGG-Face with a dataset containing more Asian faces, and found a reverse ORE that the newly-trained VGG-Face preferred Asian faces over white faces in identification accuracy. Additionally, when the number of Asian faces and white faces were matched in the dataset, the DCNN did not show any bias. To further examine how imbalanced image input led to the ORE, we performed a representational similarity analysis on VGG-Face's activation. We found that when the dataset contained more white faces, the representation of white faces was more distinct, indexed by smaller in-group similarity and larger representational Euclidean distance. That is, white faces were scattered more sparsely in the representational face space of the...

3D Printing Industry

14Trees to build largest 3D printed affordable housing project in Kenya

14Trees, a joint venture between building materials specialist LafargeHolcim and CDC Group, the UK’s publicly owned impact investor, is building Africa’s largest 3D printed affordable housing project

NBC News

Opinion | What really just happened in Barbados? A generational shift.

Perhaps against the wishes of an older West Indian generation, the new republic made a move that leaves an open question about what comes next.