Deborah Raji facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Inioluwa Deborah Raji
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| 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 brilliant computer scientist and activist from Nigeria and Canada. She works on making sure that artificial intelligence (AI) is fair and doesn't have hidden biases. She also helps check how AI systems work to make sure they are responsible.
Deborah Raji has worked with other famous researchers like Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. Together, they studied how facial recognition technology can be unfair. She also worked with Google's team that focuses on ethical AI. Today, she is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. Both MIT Technology Review and Forbes have recognized her as one of the world's top young innovators.
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. In 2015, she started a group called Project Include. This group helps students from low-income and immigrant families in the Greater Toronto Area get access to engineering education and mentorship. In August 2021, she began studying for her PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career and research
Deborah Raji worked with Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab. They were part of the Algorithmic Justice League. There, they checked facial recognition tools from big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM. They discovered that these tools were much less accurate for women with darker skin than for white men.
Their important work, along with support from other AI experts, helped convince IBM and Amazon to stop selling their facial recognition products to police for a while. Deborah also worked at a company called Clarifai. She helped create a computer vision program that could identify certain images.
She also joined a research program at Google. She worked with their Ethical AI team to create "model cards." These are like report cards for machine learning models, making it easier to understand how they work. She also helped Google develop ways to check their own AI systems. Her work at Google was shared at major computer science conferences.
In 2019, Deborah Raji was a research fellow at Partnership on AI. She helped set standards for how transparent machine learning should be. She also worked at the AI Now Institute, focusing on how to audit AI systems. Currently, she is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, where she continues to research how to evaluate AI.
Her work on bias in facial recognition was featured in a 2020 documentary called Coded Bias.
Awards and recognition
Deborah Raji has received many awards for her important work:
- In 2019, she won the VentureBeat AI Innovations Award for "AI for Good." She shared this award with Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru.
- In 2020, she was named one of the "35 Innovators Under 35" by MIT Technology Review.
- She also received the EFF Pioneer Award in 2020, again with Buolamwini and Gebru.
- In 2021, she was on the Forbes "30 Under 30" list for Enterprise Technology.
- She was also honored in the "100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame" in 2021.
- In 2023, Time magazine included her in their "100 Most Influential People in AI" list.
