{"id":13524,"date":"2023-08-25T11:30:51","date_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TheNextWeb=1399263"},"modified":"2023-08-25T11:30:51","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T11:30:51","slug":"autonomous-cars-worse-at-detecting-children-and-dark-skinned-pedestrians-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=13524","title":{"rendered":"Autonomous cars worse at detecting children and dark-skinned pedestrians, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>AI has a notorious history of biases, from facial recognition systems <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/facial-recognition-misidentifies-black-teen-kicked-out-skating-rink-segregation\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">misidentifying Black people<\/a> to chatbots <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/microsoft-pulled-plug-ai-chatbot-became-racist\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">admiring Hitler<\/a>. In some settings, the outcomes can be deadly.<\/p>\n<p>A case in point was exposed this week. According to new research,&nbsp;the pedestrian detection systems used in <span id=\"urn:enhancement-31d76c6f-0c73-47a2-a001-89a65f3abaaf\" class=\"textannotation disambiguated wl-thing\" itemid=\"https:\/\/data.thenextweb.com\/tnw\/entity\/autonomous_vehicles\"><a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/topic\/autonomous-vehicle\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">autonomous vehicle<\/a> research <\/span>have major age and race biases.<\/p>\n<p>The study adds another obstacle to the rollout of driverless cars. It also uncovers an alarming potential addition to road safety.<\/p>\n<p>The findings derive from a systematic review of eight popular pedestrian detection systems. Researchers from King\u2019s College London (KCL) tested the software on over 8,000 images of&nbsp;pedestrians.<\/p>\n<div class=\"inarticle-wrapper latest channel-cta hs-embed-tnw\">\n<div id=\"hs-embed-tnw\" class=\"channel-cta-wrapper\" readability=\"8.5\">\n<div class=\"channel-cta-img\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"js-lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/events.tnw\/hardfork-2018\/uploads\/visuals\/tnw-newsletter.png\"><\/div>\n<p><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/s3.amazonaws.com\/events.tnw\/hardfork-2018\/uploads\/visuals\/tnw-newsletter.png\"><\/noscript><\/p>\n<div class=\"channel-cta-input\" readability=\"12\">\n<p class=\"channel-cta-title\">The &lt;3 of EU tech<\/p>\n<p class=\"channel-cta-tagline\">The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol&#8217; founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It&#8217;s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>They found that the average detection accuracy was almost 20% higher for adults than it was for children. The systems were also 7.5% more accurate for light-skinned pedestrians than hey were for darker-skinned ones.<\/p>\n<p>These discrepancies stem from a common cause of AI biases: unrepresentative training data.<\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cThere\u2019s an old saying when it comes to engineering and data science, \u2018Rubbish in, rubbish out.\u2019&nbsp; AI systems need to be trained with a lot of training data, and inadequacies with that data are inevitably reflected in the AI,\u201d Dr Jie Zhang, a computer science lecturer at KCL, told TNW.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cIn this case, the open-source image galleries used to train these pedestrian detection systems are not representative of all pedestrians, and are skewed towards lighter-skinned adults. With less data to train on, the AI becomes less accurate when detecting under-represented groups.\u201d<\/span><span class=\"im\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Another issue emerged in the lighting conditions. Under low contrast and low brightness, the biases against children and dark-skinned people were exacerbated. This suggests that both groups would be at increased risk during nighttime driving.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Although car manufacturers don\u2019t publicise details on their pedestrian detection software, they\u2019re typically based on the same open-source systems used in the research. Zhang is therefore confident that they experience the same issues.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>To reduce the risks, he wants more transparency and tighter regulations on pedestrian detection systems.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u201cDevelopers should start by being more transparent when it comes to how their detection systems are trained, as well as how they perform, so they can be measured objectively \u2014 the consequences of not doing so could be dire,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut in addition to this, manufacturers need to work to make sure that their AI systems are fair and representative, and part of the impetus for that will come from policymakers and tighter regulation around fairness in AI.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>You can read the study paper <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2308.02935\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/driverless-cars-pedestrian-detection-age-race-biases\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI has a notorious history of biases, from facial recognition systems misidentifying Black people to chatbots admiring Hitler. In some settings, the outcomes can be deadly. A case in point was exposed&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13525,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13524"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}