Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Racism on the Internet sometimes also referred to as cyber-racism and more broadly considered as an online hate crime or an internet hate crime consists of racist rhetoric or bullying that is distributed through computer-mediated means and includes some or all of the following characteristics: ideas of racial uniqueness, racist attitudes towards specific social categories, racist stereotypes, hate-speech, nationalism and common destiny, racial supremacy, superiority and separation, conceptions of racial otherness, and anti-establishment world-view. Racism online can have the same effects as offensive remarks made face-to-face.
Ann Juanita Morning is an American sociologist and demographer whose research focuses on race. In particular, she has studied racial and ethnic classification on censuses worldwide, as well as beliefs about racial difference in the United States and Western Europe. Much of her work examines how contemporary science—particularly the field of genetics—influences how we conceptualize race.
Michelle Murphy is a Canadian academic. She is a professor of history and women and gender studies at the University of Toronto and director of the Technoscience Research Unit.
Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African-American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. In her work, she explores "techno-vernacular creativity" and Afrofuturism.
Marie Gottschalk is an American political scientist and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, known for her work on mass incarceration in the United States. Gottschalk is the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (2006) and Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (2016). Her research investigates the origins of the carceral state in the United States, the critiques of the scope and size of the carceral network, and the intersections of the carceral state with race and economic inequality.
Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create "unfair" outcomes, such as "privileging" one category over another in ways different from the intended function of the algorithm.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book by Safiya Umoja Noble in the fields of information science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.
Joy Adowaa Buolamwini is a Canadian-American computer scientist and digital activist formerly based at the MIT Media Lab. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), an organization that works to challenge bias in decision-making software, using art, advocacy, and research to highlight the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence (AI).
Safiya Umoja Noble is a professor at UCLA, and is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is the author of Algorithms of Oppression, and co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture and Emotions, Technology & Design. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She was appointed a Commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance in 2020. In 2020 she was nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity at the World Economic Foundation.
Ifeoma Yvonne Ajunwa is a Nigerian-American writer, AI Ethics legal scholar, sociologist, and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School. She is currently a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project (ISP) and she has been a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School since 2017. From 2021–2022, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria where she studied the role of law for tech start-ups. She was previously an assistant professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University from 2017–2020, earning tenure there in 2020.
PredPol, Inc, now known as Geolitica, is a predictive policing company that attempts to predict property crimes using predictive analytics. PredPol is also the name of the software the company produces. PredPol began as a project of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and University of California, Los Angeles professor Jeff Brantingham. PredPol has produced a patented algorithm, which is based on a model used to predict earthquake aftershocks.
Vesla Mae Weaver is an American political scientist and author. She is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins University.
The Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) is a digital advocacy non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2016 by computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, the AJL uses research, artwork, and policy advocacy to increase societal awareness regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in society and the harms and biases that AI can pose to society. The AJL has engaged in a variety of open online seminars, media appearances, and tech advocacy initiatives to communicate information about bias in AI systems and promote industry and government action to mitigate against the creation and deployment of biased AI systems. In 2021, Fast Company named AJL as one of the 10 most innovative AI companies in the world.
Rashida Richardson is a visiting scholar at Rutgers Law School and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and the Law and an attorney advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. She is also an assistant professor of law and political science at the Northeastern University School of Law and the Northeastern University Department of Political Science in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code is a 2019 American non-fiction book focusing on a range of ways in which social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies. It won the 2020 Oliver Cox Cromwell Book Prize, 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction, and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award, and has been widely reviewed.
Virginia Eubanks is an American political scientist, professor, and author studying technology and social justice. She is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. Previously Eubanks was a Fellow at New America researching digital privacy, economic inequality, and data-based discrimination.
Tawana Petty is an American author, poet, social justice organizer, mother and youth advocate who works to counter systemic racism. Petty formerly served as Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Algorithmic Justice League representing AJL in national and international processes shaping AI governance.
Credit scoring systems in the United States have garnered considerable criticism from various media outlets, consumer law organizations, government officials, debtors unions, and academics. Racial bias, discrimination against prospective employees, discrimination against medical and student debt holders, poor risk predictability, manipulation of credit scoring algorithms, inaccurate reports, and overall immorality are some of the concerns raised regarding the system. Danielle Citron and Frank Pasquale list three major flaws in the current credit-scoring system:
- Disparate impacts: The algorithms systematize biases that have been measured externally and are known to impact disadvantaged groups such as racial minorities and women. Because the algorithms are proprietary, they cannot be tested for built-in human bias.
- Arbitrary: Research shows that there is substantial variation in scoring based on audits. Responsible financial behavior can be penalized.
- Opacity: credit score technology is not transparent so consumers are unable to know why their credit scores are affected.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker from Chicago, Illinois. He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
