Joy Buolamwini

Canadian-born American computer scientist and campaigner against bias in AI systems, who founded the Algorithmic Justice League in 2016. As a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab she found that face-tracking software failed to detect her dark-skinned face until she put on a white mask, a bias she called the 'coded gaze'. Her thesis study Gender ShadesGender Shades, prop. n.: A 2018 study showing that commercial face-analysis software guessed the gender of darker-skinned women far less accurately than that of lighter-skinned men. (2018, with Timnit GebruTimnit Gebru, prop. n.: An Ethiopian-born American computer scientist who exposed racial and gender bias in AI systems, co-wrote the 'stochastic parrots' paper, and founded an independent AI research institute.) audited commercial gender-classification systems from IBM, Microsoft and Face++ and found error rates of up to about 35 percent for darker-skinned women against under 1 percent for lighter-skinned men; a 2019 follow-up with Inioluwa Deborah Raji extended the audit to Amazon. The audits became reference points in debates on algorithmic biasalgorithmic bias, n.: Unfairness in software that judges or serves people: it consistently produces worse results for some groups, such as women, older people or ethnic minorities, often because it learned from skewed or incomplete records. and facial recognitionfacial recognition, n.: Technology that identifies or checks who someone is by comparing a picture of their face with stored photos, used by phones, passport gates and police databases.: she testified to the US Congress in 2019, and in 2020 IBM, Amazon and Microsoft stopped or paused sales of the technology to police. Her work features in the documentary 'Coded Bias' (2020) and her book 'Unmasking AI' (2023).