Synthesized launches free AI tool to end financial discrimination

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Synthesized, a data technology firm, has launched a free version of its artificial intelligence-driven platform to identify and remediate algorithmic bias in data, to promote fairness, diversity and inclusion.

The so-called Community Edition a freemium version of Synthesized’s Bias Mitigation data platform, which means it will be offering financial organisations AI research and techniques to identify potential biases within their data.

The tool then removes biases within the datasets to rebalance the data and remove and remediate flaws, with no coding or deep technical expertise needed.

Nicolai Baldin, CEO and Founder of Synthesized said: “The reputational risk of all organisations is under threat due to biased data and we’ve seen this will no longer be tolerated at any level. It’s a burning priority now and must be dealt with as a matter of urgency, both from a legal and ethical standpoint.

“Synthesized’s Community Edition for Bias Mitigation is one of the first offerings specifically created to understand, investigate, and root out bias in data. We designed the platform to be very accessible, easy-to-use and highly scalable, as finance organisations have data stored across a huge range of databases and data silos.”

The platform was designed to understand a wide array of regulatory and legal definitions regarding contextual bias. It can automatically identify bias across data attributes like gender, age, race, religion, sexual orientation, and more.

The capability is available immediately. Financial users simply upload a structured data file, like a spreadsheet, to kick off the analysis process, and the inherent simplicity of the platform allows for the solution to span industries. The data platform could, for example, be used in finance to create fairer credit ratings.

Users can also connect to relational database services including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and others, to build custom datasets for analysis. The platform learns the structure of the data in real-time, and the analysis process can crunch over four million rows of data in roughly ten minutes.

Once the analysis is complete, users are provided with a Synthesized Total Fairness Score that shows what percentage of the dataset contained biased data. The platform also highlights areas of the data in which bias was detected. Then, the tool has the ability to rebalance biased data.