Deborah Raji facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Inioluwa Deborah Raji
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1995/1996 (age 29–30) |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto |
| Known for | Algorithmic bias Fairness (machine learning) Algorithmic auditing and evaluation |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Mozilla Foundation Partnership on AI AI Now Institute MIT Media Lab |
Inioluwa Deborah Raji is a talented computer scientist and activist from Nigeria and Canada. She works to make sure that artificial intelligence (AI) is fair and doesn't have hidden biases. She is an expert in checking AI systems to make sure they are working correctly and ethically.
Deborah has worked with other leading researchers like Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. Together, they studied how facial recognition technology can be unfair to different groups of people. She has also worked with big companies like Google and important organizations like the Mozilla Foundation. Her goal is to make sure AI is developed and used in a way that benefits everyone.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Deborah Raji was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. When she was four years old, her family moved to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Later, they moved to Ottawa.
She studied Engineering Science at the University of Toronto and finished her degree in 2019. While she was a student, in 2015, Deborah started a non-profit group called Project Include. This group helps students from low-income families and immigrant communities in the Greater Toronto Area get access to engineering education and support.
In August 2021, she began studying for her PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Making AI Fair
Deborah Raji has done very important work to make AI systems more fair.
Checking Facial Recognition
She worked with Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab. They looked closely at facial recognition technologies from big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM. They found that these systems were much less accurate for women with darker skin than for white men. This showed a serious problem called algorithmic bias, where AI systems can be unfair because of how they were trained.
Because of their research and public campaigns, IBM and Amazon agreed to support rules for facial recognition. Later, they even stopped selling their facial recognition products to police for a while. This showed how important Deborah's work was in making real changes.
Working with Google
Deborah also worked with Google's Ethical AI team. She helped create "model cards." These are like report cards for AI systems. They explain how an AI model was built, what data it was trained on, and how well it performs. This helps make AI more transparent and easier to understand. She also helped Google create ways to check their own AI systems for fairness.
Research and Auditing
In 2019, Deborah was a research fellow at Partnership on AI. There, she helped set standards for how transparent AI systems should be. She also worked at the AI Now Institute, focusing on how to audit (or check) AI systems for fairness.
Currently, she is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. She continues to research how to audit and evaluate AI to make sure it is fair and responsible.
Deborah's work on bias in facial recognition was even featured in a 2020 documentary film called Coded Bias.
Awards and Recognition
Deborah Raji has received many awards for her groundbreaking work:
- 2019 VentureBeat AI Innovations Award (with Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru)
- 2020 MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 Innovator Award
- 2020 EFF Pioneer Award (with Buolamwini and Gebru)
- 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30 Award in Enterprise Technology
- 2021 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame Honoree
- 2023 Time magazine 100 Most Influential People in AI
