Vicente Ordonez, assistant professor of computer science, and his collaborator Baishakhi Ray, assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University, have been awarded one of 11 National Science Foundation grants under the Amazon-backed Fairness in AI Program.The full grant award is $600,000. Their project, entitled “FAI: Measuring and Mitigating Biases in Generic Image Representations,” forms a study of societal biases present in current methods and models for computational visual recognition that are widely used as a source of generic visual representations. The research effort will bring novel insights into the sources of biases in the predictions of computer vision models and methodologies to make informed decisions about the risks in the deployment of such models.
Ordonez is also one of six winners of Salesforce AI Research grants in 2020. His project, entitled “Addressing Biases on Generic Pretrained Models,” aims to uncover and mitigate biases in generic feature extractors for both images and text.