Museum of Resistance and Resilience

Joy Buolamwini

Personally, I first heard of the term “algorithmic biases” from Joy Buolamwini’s ted talk, and it was truly an inspiration. She is an artist and a programmer graduated from MIT. One of her experiences working at the MIT Media Lab was with a facial recognizing system, and realizing that the system wouldn’t recognize a black female’s face like hers introduced her to the so-called “coded gaze”, her own word for algorithmic biases. From then on, Buolamwini has been fighting discriminatory practices resulted from algorithmic biases, knowing that instances like this only happen because people who coded the program didn’t initially include a broad range of facial structures, especially faces of people from minority groups. Bringing up inclusive coding, she encourages the tech community to welcome programmers from a larger range of racial, cultural backgrounds and is determined to fight the gap existing in the tech field that has been excluding female programmers. She even launched a website called “The Algorithmic Justice League”, sending out invitations to people who care, and people who have been suffering from the coded gaze to fight unfairness.

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