Joy Buolamwini

Image credit: Joy Buolamwini

Joy Buolamwini

Joy Buolamwini

Dr. Buolamwini earned a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology, an Master’s from University of Oxford, and MS and PhD (2022) degrees in Media Arts & Sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While a graduate student, Dr. Buolamwini was part of the MIT Media Lab. Additionally, she is the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League.

Topics covered

Dr. Buolamwini has done substantial work demonstrating how algorithms can encode bias. Her undergraduate senior project was to create a inspired “mask” mirror as a way to raise spirits for the person who looked into the mirror. The project relied on off the shelf facial recognition software that could not recognize Dr. Buolamwini’s face.

Since then, she has focused her work on demonstrating bias across racial and gender spectra in off the shelf software. Her work has been cited as directly influencing Microsoft and Google’s changes to their algorithms.

Among many other aspects, a big focus of Dr. Buolamwini’s work is pointing out the biased data which directly impacts how algorithms learn how to do tasks.

Relevant work

Other

Dr. Buolamwini has done a lot of work on how data propagates through systems to encode the same types of bias into different algorithms. In her video AI, Ain’t I a Woman? she demonstrates how systems designed to determine gender are particularly poor when using dark skinned faces.

Her work was featured in a recent documentary Coded Bias.


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