CVPR Daily - Thursday

DAILY T u e s d a y David Fouhey 12 Now that you see the world through the eyes of a teacher, are there things that you see that really aren’t working, and you think we should fix to make the community work better? Funnily enough, last year, I interviewed Andrew Fitzgibbon from Microsoft and I asked him a similar question , and he told me: “Someday we’re going to have to figure out how to do these conferences without everybody travelling to the same place.” Last year, it sounded impossible, but what a difference a year makes! I really appreciate you asking this question. One of the things that has really changed since I started in computer vision is back then you looked for the example where your system worked and you were really excited, but it was a total fantasy. Like, “Maybe one day my system will work.” Now, we have systems that do stuff. One thing I try to teach, and I want to teach better, is that if you deploy these systems in the real world, if you’re not careful, they can have real consequences. There are all these stories that float in the community from ages ago about data bias. Like an entertaining story about a tank classifier that gets 100 per cent accuracy because it determines whether it’s taken at night or during the day with pictures of Soviet tanks at night and US tanks in the day. But now there are real serious issues where people deploy things. There’s this great paper from Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru on Gender Shades and it has had real downstream impacts. It’s something that as a community we have to start thinking about because we know how a lot of these systems work and we need to make sure they’re not misused. We need to make sure that there aren’t bad outcomes and consequences. There’s an excitement about stuff working, but then this stuff can have really serious impacts and it’s important that as a community we talk about algorithmic bias and address it. Do you think the community will hear your call? How do you see things changing in this area? There are many other systemic issues and there’s a lot of reading that everyone can do. A lot of the issues that you spot in these articles are things that you’ll