Doc Star of the Month: Joy Buolamwini, 'Coded Bias'

Safe to say that Joy Buolamwini, civil rights star of both the tech world and of Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias, a globetrotting investigation into how the building blocks of AI (built, of course, almost exclusively by straight white men) have basically charted a course for systemically embedding universal inequality into our everyday lives, never set out to be either. The MIT Media Lab researcher just wanted to create a feel-good “aspire mirror” (which she eventually did) and was having trouble getting the facial-recognition software to see her face. This sent Buolamwini, a Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow (and onetime competitive pole vaulter!), on an innocent search for answers — which ended in the darkest of realizations. Literally. Turns out that the supposedly “neutral” algorithms behind the software rendered her Blackness (and femaleness) invisible. Which is why Documentary is grateful that the busy Buolamwini, who was born in Canada and grew up in Mississippi, took time away from her online freedom-fighting to be our November Doc Star of the Month. 

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.