Tag: Inclusion

Again, if you’re certain that you’re speaking to peers, that’s fine. But if you’re trying to communicate even a little more widely, then initialisms and abbreviations are obstacles to overcome. And once you’re in the habit of using the short forms, it gets harder and harder to apply context-shifting in your language. So the safest habit to form is to generally avoid using acronyms and initialisms.

This is a good reminder from Jeremy. He mentions performance in particular (we do love our acronyms). I try to avoid this, but I know I’ve been guilty of it many times. Something to improve on for sur.

Fantastic post from Marcy about the consequences of the way we build, and how we can improve.

The results from Joy Buolamwini’s research on facial recognition accuracy are disappointing to say the least.

Microsoft’s error rate for darker-skinned women was 21 percent, while IBM’s and Megvii’s rates were nearly 35 percent. They all had error rates below 1 percent for light-skinned males.

Those are bad numbers, but they shouldn’t be surprising—not when we’re training these algorithm’s with a poorly constructed data set.

One widely used facial-recognition data set was estimated to be more than 75 percent male and more than 80 percent white, according to another research study.

The stakes are just too high for us to continue to build technology without making sure we’re taking off our blinders and accounting for our biases. Oversights like this leave people out, at best. At their worst, they are capable of doing even worse.