The data journalist & NYU professor discusses confronting race, gender, & ability biases in tech.
The word glitch implies an incidental error, as easy to patch up as it is to identify. But what if racism, sexism, & ableism aren't just bugs in mostly functional machinery-what if they're coded into the system itself? In her new book, Meredith Broussard demonstrates how neutrality in tech is a myth & why algorithms need to be held accountable. A data scientist & one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, Broussard explores facial recognition technology that favors light skin, mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, & the dangers of medical diagnostic algorithms trained on insufficiently diverse data.

Broussard discusses More than a Glitch & solutions that aren't about making tech more inclusive, but rather rooting out the algorithms that target certain demographics as other to begin with.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Meredith Broussard is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University & Research Director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology. She is the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (MIT Press). Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, BBC, Wired, The Economist, & more. She appears in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias & serves on the advisory board for the Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies. More information at @merbroussard or meredithbroussard.com.