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 who used to work at the MIT Media Lab. Joy founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL). This group works to fix unfairness in decision-making software. They use art, advocacy, and research to show how artificial intelligence (AI) can cause problems.
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Early Life and Learning
Joy Buolamwini was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She grew up in Mississippi and went to Cordova High School. When she was nine, she was inspired by a robot named Kismet from MIT. She taught herself computer languages like XHTML, JavaScript, and PHP. Joy was also a great athlete, competing in pole vault and playing basketball. She even did her physics homework during basketball breaks!
College and Advanced Studies
For her college degree, Joy studied computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. There, she researched how computers can help with health information. She graduated from Georgia Tech in 2012. She was also the youngest person to be a finalist for the Georgia Tech InVenture Prize in 2009.
Joy has earned many important scholarships and fellowships. These include being a Rhodes Scholar and a Fulbright fellow. As a Rhodes Scholar, she studied technology at the University of Oxford. She earned a Master's Degree from MIT in 2017. Her research focused on finding bias in computer systems. 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 in Ethiopia. She helped create a system using Android phones to check for a disease called trachoma.
As a Fulbright fellow in 2013, she worked in Zambia. She helped young people there learn to create technology. In 2016, Joy spoke at a White House summit about computer science for everyone.
Fighting Bias in AI
Joy was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab. She worked to find unfairness in computer programs called algorithms. She also worked on ways to make these programs more responsible. For her "Gender Shades" project, she showed 1,000 faces to facial recognition systems. She found that these systems had trouble identifying dark-skinned women.
Her 2018 paper, "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification," made a big impact. Companies like IBM and Microsoft improved their software because of her findings. This showed how much influence her work had on the tech industry.
Joy also created the Aspire Mirror. This device lets people see a reflection of themselves based on who inspires them. Her group, the Algorithmic Justice League, aims to show how bias in computer code can lead to unfairness. She has made two films: Code4Rights and Algorithmic Justice League: Unmasking Bias. She also used to be the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Techturized Inc., a hair-care technology company.
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 about AI in 2023. This order is about making AI safe and trustworthy.
In 2023, Joy published her first book, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. In her book, she talks about:
- How AI can affect society.
- The problems with facial analysis systems.
- How these systems can harm people, especially if they make existing stereotypes worse.
- She also suggests ways to make AI fairer. This includes using diverse data, checking AI systems, and creating ethical rules.
AI Bias and Fairness
Dr. Joy Buolamwini’s research on AI bias has been very important for making things fairer in engineering and technology. 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 only 0.8% for lighter-skinned men. These differences showed that the AI programs might be unfair. This happens when the data used to train the AI is not balanced.
Discovering the "Coded Gaze"
Joy's own experience led her to research AI bias. While working on an art project at the MIT Media Lab, she found that commercial AI systems often couldn't detect her face because of her darker skin. This problem inspired her famous 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 accuracy dropped a lot for darker-skinned women, with mistakes happening up to 47% of the time.
Joy realized these problems came from unbalanced data. Most AI training sets had over 75% male and 80% lighter-skinned faces. To fix this, she created the Pilot Parliaments Benchmark. This is a diverse dataset designed to test AI more fairly. This new benchmark helped set a standard for better AI testing.
Her findings led to big changes in the tech industry. After her research was published, companies like IBM and Microsoft worked to improve their AI programs. However, Joy has pointed out that just making AI more accurate doesn't stop it from being misused. For example, it could still be used unfairly in things like racial profiling or hiring.
To help with these worries, Joy helped create the Safe Face Pledge. This pledge encourages tech companies to use AI in ethical ways. It asks them not to use facial recognition as a weapon. It also asks them to be open about how governments use these systems. Joy believes that making AI fair needs many different approaches, including new rules and teamwork.
Activism for Fair AI
Joy 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 that AI can cause. The group also helps people understand AI's impact. They do research on how to make AI less biased. They also work on issues where fairness and technology meet. This helps create more inclusive engineering systems.
To reach more people, AJL has worked with groups like Black Girls Code. This encourages African-American girls to go into STEM careers. This helps bring more different people into the tech world. AJL also holds workshops and provides information. 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 offers information and a live blog. Users can share stories, donate, or write to their government representatives. Joy has influenced discussions about rules to address gender discrimination in AI. She supports rules that make sure AI systems are fair in decisions. 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, especially where they could make gender unfairness worse.
Joy believed that a recent executive order from the President didn't go far enough. She felt it needed more ways to fix problems when AI systems harm minority groups. She said that the order is a "long and ongoing process." This is happening because the industry itself isn't always motivated to make these changes.
Through the Algorithmic Justice League, Joy Buolamwini has been key in supporting women, transgender, and non-binary people in technology. Her work focuses on showing and fixing AI biases that unfairly affect these groups.
In 2021, she worked with Olay on the Decode the Bias campaign. This campaign looked at biases in beauty AI that affected women of color. This project checked Olay's Skin Advisor System to make sure it treated all skin tones fairly.
AJL also launched Community Reporting of Algorithmic System Harms (CRASH). This brings people together to create tools. These tools help more people take part in making AI systems fair and responsible. This directly addresses issues that affect underrepresented genders.
Voicing Erasure Project
The Voicing Erasure section on the AJL website features spoken pieces by Joy and other experts. They talk about bias in voice systems. Joy and Allison Koenecke are lead researchers on this project. They found that speech recognition systems have the most trouble understanding African-American Vernacular English speakers. They also wrote about harmful gender stereotypes in voice recognition systems like Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana.
Joy explained in her TED talk how she tackled the "coded gaze." She showed how it ignores the connection between social impact, technology, and fairness. Her Voicing Erasure project highlights gender fairness. It shows biases in voice recognition systems. These systems often struggle to understand speech from women and non-binary people. This project pushes for more inclusive AI development.
The Coded Gaze Documentary
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 talks about the bias she believes is in artificial intelligence.
The idea for the film came when she was at MIT. She was creating her art project, "Aspire Mirror." This project uses facial recognition to show a person who inspires the user on their face. Joy expected to see Serena Williams, another dark-skinned woman, reflected on her face. But the technology didn't recognize her face. Joy's research looked into why this happened. She concluded that the exclusion of people who look like her was due to something she called the "Coded Gaze." She talks more about this idea in the documentary. The film explores how AI can have racial and gender biases. These biases can reflect the views of the people who create the AI.
Coded Bias Film
Coded Bias is a documentary film directed by Shalini Kantayya. It features Joy Buolamwini’s research on AI mistakes in facial recognition. It also looks at automated assessment software. The film focuses on what its creators 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 shows a disagreement between tenants in Brooklyn and a building company. The company tried to use facial recognition to control who entered the building. The film includes Weapons of Math Destruction author Cathy O'Neill. It also features members of Big Brother Watch in London. The documentary became available to stream on Netflix in April 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 top prize in the "Search for Hidden Figures" contest. This contest was connected to the movie Hidden Figures. The contest aimed to find new female leaders in science, technology, engineering, and math. It received 7,300 entries from young women.
Joy 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 in 2018. 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 put Joy on its list 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, Joy Buolamwini was named the ASQ Hutchens Medalist. In 2023, she was listed in the Time 100 AI.
On June 9, 2024, Dartmouth College gave Joy an honorary Doctor of Science degree. 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.
In November 2024, Joy Buolamwini received the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life (CSAARL) Octavia Butler Award in Computer Science.
On March 14, 2024, Joy Buolamwini was given the NAACP Archwell Foundation Digital Civil Rights Activist Award. Along with this award, she received $100,000 to support her future work in the field.
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 and a "Poet of Code."
See also
In Spanish: Joy Buolamwini para niños
