Google Launches ‘Project Bindi’ To Counter Social Biases In AI Models

At its flagship event, Google for India 2022, tech giant Google announced the launch of ‘Project Bindi’ to evaluate and mitigate fairness issues in publicly available natural language processing models.

“This project will allow us to advance research and knowledge and build understanding of AI models along three dimensions – societal context like family structure and education, technological gaps like access and social culture and norms,” Sapna Chadha, vice president of marketing at Google, said.

“As India’s digital journey has become powered by AI, it’s even more crucial that we consciously invest in efforts that ensure real life societal biases don’t manifest in technology. Every society, every culture has its biase…,” Chadha added.

At the event, Google announced a series of new initiatives like AI for India, which is aimed at addressing the language divide on the internet, and new collaborations and investments to drive responsible development of AI in India.

Google also announced a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, as a part of Project Vaani, to capture diverse Indian dialects for building better AI language models.

This collaboration is aimed at collecting and transcribing open source speech data from across all of India’s 773 districts, making it available through the Indian government’s Bhashini project in the future, the company said.

Interestingly, during the event, YouTube said that it would be launching ‘Courses’. The feature will have a learning management system (LMS) style element integrated into the YouTube app, and will be out in 2023.

“In 2021, YouTube’s creative ecosystem supported more than 750K full-time jobs and contributed INR 10,000 Cr to India’s GDP,” YouTube India head Ishan Chatterjee said.

Among other initiatives, Google said it is making search results pages bilingual for people who prefer it that way. Using advanced machine learning-based translation models and a cross-language search technology, it can now serve content in a local language alongside English results, the tech giant said.

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