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I got curious about computer science when I was nine years old.
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I was watching PBS and they were interviewing someone from MIT who had created a social robot namedKismet.
It had big ears that moved.
I didn’t know you could do that with machines.
Dr. Buolamwini is the face of Olay’s Decode the Bias campaign.
Eventually, I did reach MIT, but I went to Georgia Tech for my undergraduate degree.
I was working to get a robot to play peekaboo because social interactions show some forms of perceived intelligence.
I tried drawing a face on my hand and it detected that.
I happened to have a white [Halloween] mask in my office.
I put it on [and it detected that].
I was literally coding in whiteface.
I did another project where you could “paint walls” with your smile.
Same issue: Either my face wasn’t detected, or when it was I was labeled male.
I changed my research focus and started testing different systems that analyze faces.
That became my MIT master’s work, [a project] calledGender Shades.
Across the board, they work the worst on people most like me: darker-skinned women.
Dr. Buolamwini is the face of Olays Decode the Bias campaign.
Black men have been arrested [after being] linked to false facial recognition matches.
Algorithmic injustice certainly impacts marginalized communities, but no one is immune.
People have been denied access to their social security benefits.
[These systems can be] involved in the screening of job applications.
If you’re using history to train these systems, the futures going to look like the sexist past.
It’s easy to assume that because it’s a computer, it must be neutral.
It’s a seductive notion.
When we train machines, they become a mirror to our own limitations within society.
We have to keep moving toward broader representation.
I worked with Olay on theirDecode the Biascampaign [to inspire more women to pursue careers in STEM].
Then Olay made commitments [to mitigate] those issues.
For me, as a dark-skinned Black woman, to be the face of a campaign like that…
It should be part of the conversation from the beginning not something that happens after someone gets arrested.
