Joy Buolamwini facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joy Buolamwini
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Buolamwini at Wikimania 2018
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Joy Adowaa Buolamwini
23 January 1990 |
| Education | Cordova High School |
| Alma mater | Georgia Institute of Technology (BS) Jesus College, Oxford (MS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD) |
| Known for | Algorithmic Justice League |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Media Arts & Sciences Computer science Algorithmic bias |
| Institutions | MIT Media Lab |
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| Doctoral advisor | Ethan Zuckerman |
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Canadian-American computer scientist. She is also a digital activist. She used to work at the MIT Media Lab. Joy is famous for starting the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL). This group works to fix unfairness in computer programs that make decisions.
The AJL uses art, advocacy, and research to show how artificial intelligence (AI) can cause problems. They highlight how AI can be unfair and even harmful to people.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Joy Buolamwini was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She grew up in Mississippi, USA. She went to Cordova High School in Tennessee.
When she was nine, Joy was inspired by a robot named Kismet at MIT. She taught herself computer languages like XHTML, JavaScript, and PHP. Joy was also a good athlete. She was a competitive pole vaulter and played basketball. She even did her physics homework during basketball breaks!
College Studies
For her undergraduate degree, Joy studied computer science. She went to the Georgia Institute of Technology. There, she researched how computers can help with health information. She graduated from Georgia Tech in 2012. She was the youngest finalist for the Georgia Tech InVenture Prize in 2009.
Joy earned many important scholarships. These include the Rhodes Scholarship and the Fulbright Fellowship. As a Rhodes Scholar, she studied learning and technology at the University of Oxford. She was a student at Jesus College, Oxford.
She earned a Master's Degree from MIT in 2017. Her research focused on media arts and sciences. In 2022, she earned her PhD from the MIT Media Lab. Her PhD work was about "Facing the Coded Gaze."
Career and Research
In 2011, Joy worked with the Carter Center. She helped create a system for Ethiopia. This system used Android phones to check for a disease called trachoma.
As a Fulbright fellow in 2013, she worked in Zambia. She helped young Zambians learn to create technology. In 2016, she spoke at a White House summit about computer science for everyone.
Fighting AI Bias
Joy was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. She worked to find unfairness in computer programs called algorithms. She also wanted to make sure these programs were designed fairly.
In her research, Joy showed 1,000 faces to facial recognition systems. She asked the systems to tell if the faces were male or female. She found that the software had trouble identifying dark-skinned women. This project was called Gender Shades. It became part of her MIT thesis.
Her 2018 paper, Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification, was very important. Companies like IBM and Microsoft responded to her findings. They worked to make their algorithms more accurate. This showed how much influence her work had on the tech industry.
Joy also created the Aspire Mirror. This device lets users see a reflection of themselves based on someone who inspires them.
Algorithmic Justice League
Her group, the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), wants to show how unfairness in computer code can lead to discrimination. This discrimination can affect groups of people who are not often represented.
She has made two films: Code4Rights and Algorithmic Justice League: Unmasking Bias. Code4rights is an organization she started in 2012. It uses technology to spread awareness about human rights. Joy also worked as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Techturized Inc. This company focuses on hair-care technology.
In 2020, Joy's research was mentioned by Google and Microsoft. They said her work helped them fix gender and race bias in their products.
She also advised President Biden before he signed an important order in 2023. This order, called Executive Order 14110, is about making AI safe and trustworthy.
Her Book: Unmasking AI
In 2023, Joy published her first book. It is called Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. The book talks about her research.
In her book, Joy explains how AI can affect society. She warns about unfairness in facial analysis systems. She says these systems can harm many people, especially if they make existing stereotypes stronger. She believes we need to create fair data for AI. We also need to check AI systems carefully and have ethical rules. This will help reduce the unfair impact of AI.
AI Bias and Gender Equity
Dr. Joy Buolamwini’s research on AI bias has been key to making engineering and technology fairer for women. Her studies showed that AI facial recognition systems made more mistakes when identifying darker-skinned women. The error rates were as high as 34.7% for them. But for lighter-skinned men, the error rate was only 0.8%. These differences showed that AI designs might be unfair. This is because the data used to train AI can be biased.
Discovering the "Coded Gaze"
Joy’s own experience led her to research AI bias. She was working on an art project at the MIT Media Lab. This project used facial recognition. She found that commercial AI systems could not consistently detect her face. This was because of her darker skin.
This problem inspired her important research project, Gender Shades. She carefully tested facial analysis systems from IBM, Microsoft, and Face++. Her study showed that these systems were most accurate for lighter-skinned men. Their error rates were as low as 1%. But for darker-skinned women, the systems made many more mistakes. The error rates were as high as 47%.
Joy realized these problems came from unbalanced data. Most AI training sets had over 75% male faces and 80% lighter-skinned faces. To fix this, she created the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark. This is a diverse set of data. It helps make sure AI is tested fairly.
Her findings led to big changes in the tech industry. After her research was published, companies like IBM and Microsoft improved their algorithms. They reduced bias and made their systems more accurate. However, Joy has said that just making AI more accurate does not stop it from being misused. For example, it could still be used for racial profiling or unfair hiring.
Advocating for Fair AI
To address these worries, Joy helped create the Safe Face Pledge. This pledge encourages tech companies to use AI in ethical ways. It says that facial recognition should not be used as a weapon. It also bans its use by police without proper laws. And it demands that government surveillance using AI be open and clear. Joy believes that making AI fair needs many different approaches. This includes rules and working together.
Activism
Buolamwini started the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) in 2016. Its goal is to make artificial intelligence (AI) fair and responsible. The AJL uses art and research to look at how AI affects society. They work to reduce the harm caused by AI.
The group raises public awareness about AI's impact. They also do research on how to reduce bias. They work on issues where fairness and technology meet. They want to make engineering systems more inclusive and accessible. The AJL also gets the public involved. They do this through campaigns, exhibitions, and educational programs. This helps many people learn about how biased algorithms can affect gender equality.
To reach more people, AJL works with groups like Black Girls Code. This encourages African-American girls to go into STEM careers. This helps bring more diversity to the tech industry. AJL also holds workshops and provides resources. These teach the public and tech community about AI biases. They especially focus on helping underrepresented genders understand and challenge these systems.
The AJL website has information and a live blog. Users can share stories, donate, or write to their government representatives. Joy has influenced policy discussions. She advocates for rules that make sure AI-powered decision-making systems are fair. In 2019, she spoke to the United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform. She talked about the dangers of facial recognition technology. She stressed that these systems need to be held accountable. This is especially true where they could make gender inequalities worse.
Joy believes that President Biden's executive order on AI did not go far enough. She thinks it needs more ways to fix problems for minority communities harmed by AI. She said that this order is a "long and ongoing process." She believes it is happening because the industry is not motivated to fix these issues on its own.
Through the Algorithmic Justice League, Joy Buolamwini has been important in supporting women, transgender, and non-binary people in technology. Her work focuses on showing and fixing biases in AI. These biases unfairly affect these groups.
Buolamwini has led campaigns for gender equality in AI and technology. In 2021, she worked with Olay on the Decode the Bias campaign. This campaign looked at biases in beauty algorithms that affected women of color. This project checked Olay's Skin Advisor System. It made sure the system treated all skin tones fairly.
Building on these efforts, AJL launched CRASH. This stands for Community Reporting of Algorithmic System Harms. CRASH brings together important people to create tools. These tools help more people take part in making AI systems fair and responsible. This directly helps with issues affecting underrepresented genders.
Voicing Erasure
The Voicing Erasure section on the AJL website has spoken pieces by Joy and other experts. They talk about bias in voice systems. Joy and Allison Koenecke are the main researchers on this project. They work to find biases in voice systems.
They have written that speech recognition systems have the most trouble with speakers of African-American Vernacular English. They also say these systems are secretly listening to users' conversations. They have also written about what they see as harmful gender stereotypes. These are spread by voice recognition systems like Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana.
Joy's ideas have faced criticism from companies like Amazon. But in her TED talk, she explained how she deals with the "coded gaze." She highlights how it ignores the connection between social impact, technology, and inclusion.
Her Voicing Erasure project shows how voice recognition systems can be unfair to women and non-binary people. It often struggles to understand their speech accurately. This project raises awareness of these limits. It pushes for AI to be developed in a more inclusive way.
The Coded Gaze
The Coded Gaze is a short documentary film. It first showed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2016. You can watch it on YouTube. In the film, Joy Buolamwini talks about the bias she believes is in artificial intelligence.
The idea for the film and her research came when she was at MIT. She was creating her art project, "Aspire Mirror." This project uses facial recognition. It reflects someone who inspires a user onto that user's face. Joy hoped to see Serena Williams, another dark-skinned woman, reflected on her face. But the technology did not recognize her face.
Joy's research looked into why this happened. She concluded that the exclusion of people who look like her was because of something she calls the "Coded Gaze." She talks more about this idea in the documentary. The film shows how AI can have racial and gender biases. These biases reflect the views and backgrounds of the people who create the AI.
Coded Bias
Coded Bias is a documentary film directed by Shalini Kantayya. It features Joy Buolamwini’s research. The film is about how AI facial recognition technology and automated assessment software can be inaccurate.
It focuses on what the filmmakers see as a lack of rules for facial recognition tools. These tools are sold by IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon. The film says these tools continue racial and gender bias. The film also describes a conflict between tenants in Brooklyn and a building company. The company tried to use facial recognition to control who could enter the building. The film was available to stream on Netflix starting April 5, 2021.
Exhibitions
Projects by the Algorithmic Justice League have been shown in art places. These include the Barbican Centre in London, UK, and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.
- The Criminal Type (2019) Exhibition at APEXART, New York, NY, US
- Understanding AI (2019) Exhibition at Ars Electronica Center, Linz, Austria
- AI: More than Human (2019) Exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London, UK
- Nine Moments for Now (2018) Exhibition at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, US
- Big Bang Data (2018) Exhibition at MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA, US
Awards and Honors
In 2017, Joy won the grand prize in the "Search for Hidden Figures" contest. This contest was linked to the movie Hidden Figures. The contest aimed to find the next generation of female leaders in science, technology, engineering, and math.
Buolamwini gave a TEDx talk called How I'm fighting bias in algorithms. In 2018, she was on the TED Radio Hour. She was also featured on Amy Poehler's Smart Girls. Fast Company magazine called her one of four "design heroes who are defending democracy online." She was also listed as one of BBC's 100 Women in 2018.
In 2019, Fortune magazine listed her as one of the "World's 50 Greatest Leaders." The magazine called her "the conscience of the A.I. revolution." She also made the first Time 100 Next list in 2019. In 2020, Joy was part of a women's empowerment campaign by Levi's for International Women's Day. She was also in the documentary Coded Bias. In 2020, she received the Great Immigrants Award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
In 2022, Buolamwini was named the ASQ Hutchens Medalist. In 2023, she was listed in the Time 100 AI.
On June 9, 2024, Joy Buolamwini received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Dartmouth College. This was for her work in showing biases in AI systems and preventing AI from causing harm. She was also the main speaker for Dartmouth's 2024 Social Justice Awards.
Personal Life
Joy Buolamwini has lived in many places. These include Ghana; Barcelona, Spain; Oxford, United Kingdom; and in the U.S., Memphis, Tennessee, and Atlanta, Georgia.
She describes herself as a "daughter of the science and of the arts." Her father is an academic, and her mother is an artist. Joy also calls herself a "Poet of Code."
See also
In Spanish: Joy Buolamwini para niños
