Joy Buolamwini
Gender Shades
Auditing face recognition, and being invisible to it
Rating
88Impact score
Domains
Algorithmic auditingComputer visionPolicy
Scouting report
Found as an MIT student that face detection would not see her face until she put on a white mask, and turned that into Gender Shades, a systematic audit of commercial classifiers by skin tone and gender. Founded the Algorithmic Justice League. The work fed directly into moratoria on police use of face recognition in several US cities.
Curator’s note
Started with a white mask in a lab and ended in city legislation.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Joy Buolamwini by Niccolò Caranti, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources
- 01Joy Buolamwini en.wikipedia.org
- 02Gender Shades gendershades.org