Archive

Compassion through Computation: Fighting Algorithmic Bias

I think the ques­tion I’m try­ing to for­mu­late is, how in this world of increas­ing opti­miza­tion where the algo­rithms will be accu­rate… They’ll increas­ing­ly be accu­rate. But their appli­ca­tion could lead to dis­crim­i­na­tion. How do we stop that?

Big Data Bodies: Machines and Algorithms in the World

I’m inter­est­ed in data and dis­crim­i­na­tion, in the things that have come to make us unique­ly who we are, how we look, where we are from, our per­son­al and demo­graph­ic iden­ti­ties, what lan­guages we speak. These things are effec­tive­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to machines. What is gen­er­al­ly cel­e­brat­ed as human diver­si­ty and expe­ri­ence is trans­formed by machine read­ing into some­thing absurd, some­thing that marks us as different.

Your Body is a Honeypot
Loving Out Loud When There’s No Place to Hide

We have to ask who’s cre­at­ing this tech­nol­o­gy and who ben­e­fits from it. Who should have the right to col­lect and use infor­ma­tion about our faces and our bod­ies? What are the mech­a­nisms of con­trol? We have gov­ern­ment con­trol on the one hand, cap­i­tal­ism on the oth­er hand, and this murky grey zone between who’s build­ing the tech­nol­o­gy, who’s cap­tur­ing, and who’s ben­e­fit­ing from it.

Surveillance and Race Online

[The] ques­tion of what hap­pens when black­ness enters the frame can kind of neat­ly encap­su­late the ways I’ve been think­ing and try­ing to talk about sur­veil­lance for the last few years.

Machines That Can Read Human Emotions

The face is a con­stant flow of facial expres­sions. We react and emote to exter­nal stim­uli all the time. And it is exact­ly this flow of expres­sions that is the observ­able win­dow to our inner self. Our emo­tions, our inten­tions, atti­tudes, moods. Why is this impor­tant? Because we can use it in a very wide vari­ety of applications.