Explaining Explainable AI: Camille Eddy on Looking into the Black Box

In this episode of The New Stack Makers, TC Currie chats with Camille Eddy, whose interest in Explainable AI (XAI) started during an internship on advanced robotics at Hewlett Packard.  It’s also where she became concerned about the effect of the lack of diversity in social robots. Her talk “Recognizing Cultural Bias in AI,” given at the 2018 Open Source Conference started with this question:  “How could something as unchanging as the color of a person’s skin prevent them from being able to enjoy any product I create.” When we think about how we live and going around interacting with technology, Eddy said, we don’t always think of the interactions of other people. For example, the famous epic fail of a hand soap dispenser at Facebook HQ not dispensing soap to a black hand because it hadn’t been calibrated to see that skin color.