Racial categories in machine learning

Understand

Controversies around race and machine learning have sparked debate among computer scientists over how to design machine learning systems that guarantee fairness.

• These debates rarely engage with how racial identity is embedded in our social experience, making for sociological and psychological complexity.
• This complexity challenges the paradigm of considering fairness to be a formal property of supervised learning with respect to protected personal attributes.
• Racial identity is not simply a personal subjective quality.