Commissioner for Protection of Equality Brankica Jankovic spoke with Sanja Vranes, Director of the Mihajlo Pupin Institute, a leading research institution in the field of information and communication technologies. The main topic of the meeting was the impact of the widespread use of artificial intelligence in the labor market, primarily on equality and equal treatment in employment.

“Algorithms in artificial intelligence are as good as the correct data used in their production, and a properly designed algorithm for processing job applications has the potential to eliminate discrimination in the hiring process altogether,” said commissioner and reminded of the Council of Europe’s most important recommendations when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence, namely the assessment of the impact on human rights, equality and non-discrimination.

Director Vranes stressed that the world’s most famous IT companies, where thousands of applicants apply, often resort to artificial intelligence, which is most often machine learning based on deep neural networks. For example, if 90% of a company’s employees are male developers, there is a good chance that the software will recommend a male candidate nine times more often. Namely, neural networks are trained on real data on employees already working in these companies, and if there was discrimination on any grounds, this will be directly reflected on the employment recommendations provided by the software through the training of neural networks, Vranes explained.

Commissioner and the Director of Pupin Institute also discussed future cooperation in the field of human rights protection and modern information and communication technologies.