Daphné Marnat
Battling sexism in AI
By Eve Chatelet
Daphné Marnat, who lives in Nice, is campaigning for people-based technology and a place for women in the digital world. According to UNESCO, only 22% of professionals working in Artificial Intelligence are women. Daphné provides user-focused support to companies deploying new technology. In association with a data scientist, this anthropologist and expert in social sciences has just launched Unbias, a start-up that first saw the light of day at Telecom Paris Eurecom Sophia Antipolis. As companies increasingly use chat-bots to manage relationships with customers, Daphné hopes to fight the sexist or racial discrimination expressed by some algorithms, while remaining aware that algorithms simply reproduce what they have learned from people. For example, on the web we often see sentences such as “mothers may take time off to care for sick children”, where it should read “parents may take time off”! The technology developed by Unbias searches out such sexist language and replaces it with less discriminatory words or syntax. It’s a way to take action and develop a more ethical AI. But Daphné isn’t stopping with words, she is already planning to root out sexism in images and sound as well.
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