Joy Buolamwini

Computer scientist

When she was an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Joy Buolamwini was trying to teach a robot to play peek-a-boo when she found it couldn’t recognise her face. When another robot failed to identify her face unless she wore a white mask,

she realised that there was racial bias in the datasets both robots had been trained on. She launched the Algorithmic Justice League in 2016 to promote equitable artificial intelligence and developed something called “InCoding,” a series of practical steps to make AI models more inclusive. In 2022, as the possibility of sentient AI grabs headlines, Buolamwini’s theory of code will be more vital than ever.