creators

Joy Buolamwini - Algorithmic Justice League founder

Joy Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League, wrote the 2018 Gender Shades study on facial-recognition bias and the 2023 book Unmasking AI.

Joy Buolamwini is a computer scientist and digital activist who founded the Algorithmic Justice League in 2016 while a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, and who is listed on the organisation's own page as its founder and president. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Georgia Tech and master's degrees from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and from MIT; she finished her PhD at the Media Lab in 2022, which now lists her as a past member. Her 2018 study "Gender Shades", written with Timnit Gebru, tested the commercial gender-classification systems of IBM, Microsoft and Face++ and reported error rates of up to 34.7% for darker-skinned women against a maximum of 0.8% for lighter-skinned men. It moved the argument about face recognition from principle to measurement, and fed into municipal and corporate limits on the technology. Through AJL she works across research, art and advocacy. She is the subject of the 2020 documentary Coded Bias and wrote Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines, published on 31 October 2023. TIME put her on its first TIME100 AI list in September 2023. She is a fellow of the Accelerator Fellowship Programme at Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, and was elected to the board of the Legal Defense Fund in November 2025.

Specialization

algorithmic bias, facial recognition, AI accountability, tech policy advocacy

Country

United States