Week 3

This week, I met with the professor and we spoke about the kind of projects that I would be interested in. I was speaking to Veronica about the same and she told me about how the project that she was working on had to do with language visual models and gender bias. I thought the idea of ML and gender bias was really interesting to me. We have spoken about a concept called social computing at UCSD; the idea of ML models being biased because of an inherent bias in training data seemed really interesting to me. I conveyed the same to the professor.

He seemed really interested by the idea and gave me an idea as to what I should continue working on. He sent me a couple of papers to read about the same. There was one very interesting paper about sexual objectification bias and gender. Upon reading all of these papers, my resolve to do something with gender bias and ML was only strengthened. Especially as a women, I felt that it was my responsibility to work on this project and make ML models more fair for fellow women.

So, I ended up working with Veronica on her project. Her project was to create a benchmark of the pictures of politicians to test gender bias in laguage and visual models. I have decided to work with her on that project.