IIT-M’s new tech to make AI fairer, less biased

Dr Deepak Padmanabhan, researcher at Queen’s varsity and Adjunct Faculty Member at IIT-M has been leading an international project, working with Savitha Abraham and Sowmya Sundaram, PhD students, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT-M to tackle the discrimination problem within clustering algorithms.

Companies often use AI technologies to sift through huge amounts of data in situations such as an oversubscribed job vacancy or in policing when there is a large volume of CCTV data linked to a crime.

AI sorts through the data, grouping it to form a manageable number of clusters, which are groups of data with common characteristics.

‘’It is then much easier for an organisation to analyse manually and either shortlist or reject the entire group. However, while AI can save on time, the process is often biased in terms of race, gender, age, religion and country of origin,’’ a IIT-M release said here on Wednesday.