Where: WPXI-TV, “Businesses are increasingly turning to AI to ensure accessibility for people with disabilities. Is it working?”
Who: Shomir Wilson, associate professor in the College of IST; and Mukund Srinath and Pranav Venkit, who each completed a doctoral degree in Informatics from the College of IST
What: The online news report cited "Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Models," an award-winning paper by the IST researchers.
“In 2023, researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that some AI models used to categorize large amounts of text exhibited biases against people with disabilities. These models tend to classify sentences as negative or ‘toxic’ based on the presence of disability-related terms without regard for the context.”
Read the related Penn State News story>>>
Photo Credit: Getty Images/Oliver Berg