Joy Buolamwini

While studying at MIT, in order to be “seen” by facial recognition software, Joy Buolamwini had to don a white Halloween mask. An absurd but piercing metaphor for the coded biases embedded in supposedly neutral technology. “Coding in whiteface,” she later wrote, became a moment of reckoning with technology, the industry, and herself. That moment gave birth to what she calls the coded gaze, a term that has since entered the vocabulary of AI ethics.

Today, Buolamwini is one of the most incisive and courageous voices on AI and its hidden costs. A computer scientist, poet, and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), she exposes how AI systems often amplify societal biases. Discriminating along lines of race, gender, and identity. Her TED Talk on algorithmic bias garnered nearly two million views, and her MIT thesis, Gender Shades, shook the AI industry by revealing stark disparities in facial analysis software from Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon. Her findings led to corporate reforms and sparked global debate.

Through the AJL, Joy Buolamwini has created a model for participatory tech accountability. Inviting everyday people, policymakers, and engineers alike to report harms and rethink AI’s role in society. Her efforts have earned her a seat on the Global Tech Panel, where she advises world leaders and tech executives on how to reduce AI’s harms and expand its benefits. In a world where AI touches nearly every aspect of life, Buolamwini is insistent that we retain our human agency. She reminds us that machines reflect the minds and systems that build them. And if those systems are biased, exclusionary, or unaccountable, so too will be the technologies they produce.

Joy Buolamwini’s bestselling book, Unmasking AI, is a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year and a finalist for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award. As Brené Brown put it, the book invites us to decide “who we are going to be and how we’re going to use technology in service of what it means to be fully human.” Buolamwini has addressed the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. Her visual poem AI, Ain’t I A Woman?, which reveals how facial recognition systems fail to detect the faces of iconic Black women such as Oprah Winfrey and Serena Williams, has been exhibited at the Barbican Centre in London and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.