Joy Buolamwini

The digital activist is fighting human prejudices embedded in machines.

- Arianne Cohen

WHEN JOY BUOLAMWINI was 9 years old, she saw a TV documentary about Kismet, the MIT-built social robot that could interact face-to-face. To the young would-be scientist, the technology was magic. She was mesmerised and resolved to understand it.

But in 2010, while an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Buolamwini hit an algorithmic obstacle. “For a social robot to socialise with a human, it has to be able to detect that human’s face,” she says. The robot she was experimenting with for class could detect her roommate’s light skinned face, but not Buolamwini’s. The next year, at a lab in Hong Kong, it happened again. “I thought to myself, You know, I assumed this issue would’ve been solved by now,” she says.