In the fight against the novel coronavirus, many countries ordered that citizens have their temperature checked at train stations or airports. The device needed in such situations, a hand-held thermometer, has risen from a specialist item to a common sight.
In an experiment that became viral on Twitter, AlgorithmWatch showed that Google Vision Cloud, a computer vision service, labeled an image of a dark-skinned individual holding a thermometer “gun” while a similar image with a light-skinned individual was labeled “electronic device”. A subsequent experiment showed that the image of a dark-skinned hand holding a thermometer was labelled “gun” and that the same image with a salmon-colored overlay on the hand was enough for the computer to label it “monocular”.