Spotting Prejudice

Despite prejudice cannot be directly observed, nonverbal behaviours provide profound hints on people inclinations. In this study, we use recent sensing technologies and machine
learning techniques to automatically infer the results of psychological questionnaires frequently used to assess implicit prejudice. In particular, we recorded 32 students discussing
with both white and black collaborators. Then, we identified a set of features allowing automatic extraction and measured their degree of correlation with psychological scores. Results
confirmed that automated analysis of nonverbal behaviour is actually possible thus paving the way for innovative clinical
tools and eventually more secure societies.

The Prejudice team of unimore composed by Imagelab memebers Andrea Palazzi, Simone Calderara and Rita Cucchiara has gained the attention of the scientific community with their recent work about  "Spotting prejudice with nonverbal behaviours" presented at UBICOMP 2016.

Check out our "Prejudice dataset" here.

Attached a Press release of all articles that talk about our work on the web and in printed papers:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23130933-200-camera-spots-your-hidden-prejudices-from-your-body-language/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3813425/Can-computer-tell-RACIST-Algorithm-detect-hidden-prejudice-person-s-body-language.html

http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2016/09/29/news/studio_razzismo_ecco_l_algoritmo_italiano_per_smascherare_i_pregiudizi_anche_inconsapevoli-148760996/

http://myinforms.com/en-gb/a/41993012-camera-spots-your-hidden-prejudices-from-your-body-language/

http://anglenews.com/can-a-computer-tell-if-youre-racist-algorithm-can-detect-hidden-prejudice-from-a-persons-body-language/

http://tech.fanpage.it/l-algoritmo-italiano-che-svela-razzismo-e-pregiudizi/

https://www.tomshw.it/l-algoritmo-italiano-per-smascherare-razzismo-e-pregiudizi-80376

https://www.bcrmagazine.it/201633983/razzismo-ecco-lalgoritmo-italiano-per-smascherare-i-pregiudizi-anche-inconsapevoli.php

http://23on.com/razzismo-ecco-lalgoritmo-italiano-per-smascherare-i-pregiudizi-anche-inconsapevoli/

http://www.modicanews.com/can-a-computer-tell-if-youre-racist-algorithm-can-detect-hidden-prejudice-from-a-persons-body-language/

http://huntnews.in/p/detail/2821262581067916?uc_param_str=dnfrpfbivesscpgimibtbmntnijblauputoggdnw&pos=1475155800173&channel=technology&chncat=category_english

http://ebalsblog.blogspot.it/2016/09/can-computer-tell-if-youre-racist-new.html

http://www.looooker.com/archives/34774

http://newsfeeds.pegitboard.com/news/can-a-computer-tell-if-you-re-racist-algorithm-can-detect-hidden-prejudice-from-a-person-s-body-language?uid=24563

We designed a study on prejudice towards black people in which 60 participants were requested to talk about the same topics with both white and black peers collaborating with us. All interactions have been recorded with several sensors to extract as many features as possible. To minimise experimental artefacts, we gave participants no constraint on how to behave during the interactions. For each participant, we tested both implicit (largely outside conscious awareness) and explicit prejudice (of which individuals are clearly aware).

We extract different features:

• Mutual Distance
• Interaction Volume
• Pauses in DIalogue
• Biometric Features

​A Classifier was devoted to reproduce the outcomes of psychological tests.

Publications

1

Palazzi, Andrea; Calderara, Simone; Bicocchi, Nicola; Vezzali, Loris; DI BERNARDO, GIAN ANTONIO; Zambonelli, Franco; Cucchiara, Rita "Spotting prejudice with nonverbal behaviours" Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing 2016, Heidelberg, Germany, pp. 853 -862 , 12-16 September 2016, 2016 | DOI: 10.1145/2971648.2971703 Conference