TOP 10

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Like many of the women on this list , Joy Buolamwini is obsessed with making AI fair . As a grad student at MIT , she pioneered research into AI bias . In 2020 , she was part of efforts to discredit facial recognition systems that had wildly different error rates corresponding to skin colour . Amazon , Microsoft and IBM suspended their facial recognition programmes as a result . And her beat goes on . She said , “ When I started talking about this , in 2016 , it was such a foreign concept . Today , I can ’ t go online without seeing some news article or story about a biased AI system . People are just now waking up to the fact that there is a problem . Awareness is good – and then that awareness needs to lead to action . That is the phase that we ’ re in .”

FEBRUARY 2021