Understanding the Social Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition
Team Members:
Morgan Scheuerman, Stacy Branham Relevant Publications: Hamidi, F., Scheuerman, M. K., Branham, S. M. Gender Recognition or Gender Reductionism? The SocialImplications of Automatic Gender Recognition Systems. Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018, to appear, New York: ACM. |
Emerging technologies that use a variety of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to attempt to automatically recognize complex human characteristics, such as gender, sexual preference and even criminality, are becoming more prevalent. While the majority of research on these systems have focused on solving the technical challenges they pose, it is crucial to understand the social and ethical dilemmas that they cause as well.
In this project, we look at the impact of automatic gender recognition (AGR) technology from the lens of transgender individuals. Studying this underrepresented perspective provides us with an opportunity to learn about how automatic technologies that are designed without consultation with human agents can pose threats to their identity, autonomy, and privacy. |