mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

"Excavating AI" Re-excavated: Debunking a Fallacious Account of the JAFFE Dataset

arXiv 2107.13998 ↗First posted 28 Jul 2021cs.CY cs.AI cs.CVcited by 12

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Abstract (arXiv)

Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they published a nonfactual account of the images in the essay "Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets." The present article recounts the creation of the JAFFE dataset and unravels each of Crawford and Paglen's fallacious statements. I also discuss JAFFE more broadly in connection with research on facial expression, affective computing, and human-computer interaction.

Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 8 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2021.

Builds on

8 of 63 references.

References · 8

  1. 2020Coding Facial Expressions with Gabor Wavelets (IVC Special Issue)cited by 11
  2. 2018Cross-Cultural and Cultural-Specific Production and Perception of Facial Expressions of Emotion in the Wildcited by 4
  3. 2020Excavating "Excavating AI": The Elephant in the Gallerycited by 2
  4. 2020New interfaces for musical expressioncited by 2
  5. 2017Dimensional Affect and Expression in Natural and Mediated Interactioncited by 1
  6. 2017A Mimetic Strategy to Engage Voluntary Physical Activity In Interactive Entertainmentcited by 1
  7. 2020Suspect AI: Vibraimage, Emotion Recognition Technology, and Algorithmic Opacitycited by 1
  8. 2020Facial gesture interfaces for expression and communicationcited by 1

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2023: 4; 2024: 5; 2025: 3.

12 papers.

  1. 2023Metrics for Dataset Demographic Bias: A Case Study on Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 12
  2. 2024Fairness and Bias Mitigation in Computer Vision: A Surveycited by 12
  3. 2023ARBEx: Attentive Feature Extraction with Reliability Balancing for Robust Facial Expression Learningcited by 9
  4. 2023DSAP: Analyzing Bias Through Demographic Comparison of Datasetscited by 5
  5. 2025MOLE: Metadata Extraction and Validation in Scientific Papers Using LLMscited by 4
  6. 2024GCF: Graph Convolutional Networks for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 2
  7. 2023Neural Architecture Search Using Genetic Algorithm for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 1
  8. 2025A Perception CNN for Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 1
  9. 2024Ada-DF: An Adaptive Label Distribution Fusion Network For Facial Expression Recognitioncited by 0
  10. 2024GReFEL: Geometry-Aware Reliable Facial Expression Learning under Bias and Imbalanced Data Distributioncited by 0
  11. 2024Calibrating Practical Privacy Risks for Differentially Private Machine Learningcited by 0
  12. 2025HQFNN: A Compact Quantum-Fuzzy Neural Network for Accurate Image Classificationcited by 0