Related papers: Flickr Africa: Examining Geo-Diversity in Large-Sc…
Each day billions of photographs are uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms. These images are packed with information about how people live around the world. In this paper we exploit this rich trove of data to…
Text-to-image (T2I) models are rapidly gaining popularity, yet their outputs often lack geographical diversity, reinforce stereotypes, and misrepresent regions. Given their broad reach, it is critical to rigorously evaluate how these models…
The increasing tendency to collect large and uncurated datasets to train vision-and-language models has raised concerns about fair representations. It is known that even small but manually annotated datasets, such as MSCOCO, are affected by…
Large-scale human mobility datasets play increasingly critical roles in many algorithmic systems, business processes and policy decisions. Unfortunately there has been little focus on understanding bias and other fundamental shortcomings of…
Recent work has identified substantial disparities in generated images of different geographic regions, including stereotypical depictions of everyday objects like houses and cars. However, existing measures for these disparities have been…
Computer vision is a broad field of study that encompasses different tasks (e.g., object detection). Although computer vision is relevant to the African communities in various applications, yet computer vision research is under-explored in…
Satellite imagery is increasingly used to complement traditional data collection approaches such as surveys and censuses across scientific disciplines. However, we ask: Do all places on earth benefit equally from this new wealth of…
User participation in online communities is driven by the intertwinement of the social network structure with the crowd-generated content that flows along its links. These aspects are rarely explored jointly and at scale. By looking at how…
Interactions between people and ecological systems, through leisure or tourism activities, form a complex socio-ecological spatial network. The analysis of the benefits people derive from their interactions with nature -- also referred to…
Social media users share billions of items per year, only a small fraction of which is geotagged. We present a data- driven approach for identifying non-geotagged content items that can be associated with a hyper-local geographic area by…
Deep learning-based person identification and verification systems have remarkably improved in terms of accuracy in recent years; however, such systems, including widely popular cloud-based solutions, have been found to exhibit significant…
We explore varying face recognition accuracy across demographic groups as a phenomenon partly caused by differences in face illumination. We observe that for a common operational scenario with controlled image acquisition, there is a large…
Obtaining detailed and reliable data about local economic livelihoods in developing countries is expensive, and data are consequently scarce. Previous work has shown that it is possible to measure local-level economic livelihoods using…
Despite impressive advances in object-recognition, deep learning systems' performance degrades significantly across geographies and lower income levels raising pressing concerns of inequity. Addressing such performance gaps remains a…
We reveal critical insights into problems of bias in state-of-the-art facial recognition (FR) systems using a novel Balanced Faces In the Wild (BFW) dataset: data balanced for gender and ethnic groups. We show variations in the optimal…
Driven by an increasing prevalence of trackers, ever more IoT sensors, and the declining cost of computing power, geospatial information has come to play a pivotal role in contemporary predictive models. While enhancing prognostic…
The social media site Flickr allows users to upload their photos, annotate them with tags, submit them to groups, and also to form social networks by adding other users as contacts. Flickr offers multiple ways of browsing or searching it.…
In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging…
Meta-data from photo-sharing websites such as Flickr can be used to obtain rich bag-of-words descriptions of geographic locations, which have proven valuable, among others, for modelling and predicting ecological features. One important…
In Africa, the scarcity of computational resources and medical datasets remains a major hurdle to the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in clinical settings, further contributing to global bias. These…