
William
Thong
Profile
At Sony AI, William is a research scientist in the AI Ethics research flagship. Prior to joining Sony AI, he was a Ph.D. researcher in computer vision at the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of Cees Snoek (VIS lab). William’s Ph.D. research involved visual search, learning with limited labels, and model biases. Previously, he completed an M.Sc. in biomedical engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, under the supervision of Samuel Kadoury (MedICAL lab) and Chris Pal (Mila). During his graduate studies, William was supported by several scholarships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Message
“My work at Sony AI currently focuses on algorithm fairness to enable a better assessment of potential biases and their mitigation in computer vision problems.”
Publications
This paper strives to measure apparent skin color in computer vision, beyond a unidimensional scale on skin tone. In their seminal paper Gender Shades, Buolamwini and Gebru have shown how gender classification systems can be biased against women with darker skin tones. While…
Human-centric image datasets are critical to the development of computer vision technologies. However, recent investigations have foregrounded significant ethical issues related to privacy and bias, which have resulted in the complete retraction, or modification, of several …
Image quality assessment (IQA) forms a natural and often straightforward undertaking for humans, yet effective automation of the task remains highly challenging. Recent metrics from the deep learning community commonly compare image pairs during training to improve upon trad…
Blog

September 21, 2023 | AI Ethics
Beyond Skin Tone: A Multidimensional Measure of Apparent Skin Color
-->Advancing Fairness in Computer Vision: A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Skin Color Analysis In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) and computer vision, fairness is a principle that has gained substantial …
-->Advancing Fairness in Computer Vision: A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Skin Color Analysis In the ever-evolving landscape of ar…

April 17, 2023 | AI Ethics
Exposing Limitations in Fairness Evaluations: Human Pose Estimation
As AI technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, we reveal new ways in which AI model biases may harm individuals. In 2018, for example, researchers Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru revealed how commercial services classify human …
As AI technology becomes increasingly ubiquitous, we reveal new ways in which AI model biases may harm individuals. In 2018, for e…
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