Shalini Kantayya describes herself as a filmmaker who's fascinated with disruptive technologies and the good or harm they create. In a data-driven and increasingly automated world, there's a question of how to protect our civil liberties as artificial intelligence grows by the day. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini discovered that most facial recognition technology does not see dark-skinned faces and women's faces accurately. This led to an investigation of how the technology we typically see as objective can actually encode racism and sexism. Buolamwini, and others working to change technology for the better around the globe, are featured in Kantayya's documentary Coded Bias.

An upcoming PBS documentary dives deep into the controversy surrounding bias in artificial intelligence (AI). Coded Bias explores MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini's shocking discovery that facial recognition does not see women and dark-skinned faces accurately. The 90-minute film covers her push for U.S. government legislation against bias in algorithms that are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern-day society. Directed by award-winning filmmaker Shalini Kantayya, Coded Bias will premiere on PBS and PBS video app on March 22. Kantayya tells the story of dynamic women leading the fight for the ethical use of AI. She profiles data scientists, mathematicians, ethicists, and everyday citizens from around the world who have been impacted by these disruptive technologies and are fighting to shed light on the impact of unconscious bias in artificial intelligence.

The protests across the U.S. and around the globe in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have raised awareness about structural inequalities. Though the specific focus has been on police brutality, scholars, activists, and artists are sounding the alarm on how systemic racism has been amplified in other areas like the tech industry, through communication and surveillance technology. In Coded Bias, a documentary by Shalini Kantayya, the director follows MIT Media Lab researcher and Algorithmic Justice League founder Joy Buolamwini as she discovers one of the fundamental problems with facial recognition. While working on a facial recognition art project, Buolamwini realizes that the computer vision software was having trouble tracking her face, but it worked fine when she put on a white mask. It was just the latest evidence of the type of bias that's baked into facial recognition and A.I. systems These technologies often connect back to the dark historical practices of racialized surveillance, eugenics, or physiognomy.

Algorithms make decisions for humans every day. Some decide who gets the COVID-19 vaccine first, while others determine what candidate gets a job or which person gets undue police scrutiny. But these same systems have not been vetted for bias or discrimination -- nor do they have standards for accuracy. A discovery made by MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini revealed that facial recognition technology does not see dark-skinned faces accurately. That finding inspired Coded Bias, a 90-minute documentary created by director/producer Shalini Kantayya.

IN HER first semester as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini encountered a peculiar problem. Commercial face-recognition software, which detected her light-skinned classmates just fine, couldn't "see" her face. Until, that is, she donned a white plastic mask in frustration. Coded Bias is a timely, thought-provoking documentary from director Shalini Kantayya. It follows Buolamwini's journey to uncover racial and sexist bias in face-recognition software and other artificial intelligence systems.

Facial recognition systems from large tech companies often incorrectly classify black women as male -- including the likes of Michelle Obama, Serena Williams and Sojourner Truth. That's according to Joy Buolamwini, whose research caught wide attention in 2018 with "AI, Ain't I a Woman?" a spoken-word piece based on her findings at MIT Media Lab. The video, along with the accompanying research paper written with Timnit Gebru of Microsoft Research, prompted many tech companies to reassess their facial recognition data sets and algorithms for darker and more female-looking faces. "Coded Bias," a documentary directed by Shalini Kantayya which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January, interweaves Buolamwini's journey of creating the Algorithmic Justice League, an advocacy organization, with other examples of facial recognition software being rolled out around the world -- on the streets of London, in housing projects in Brooklyn and broadly across China. Jennifer 8. Lee, a journalist and documentary producer, caught up with Joy Buolamwini and Shalini Kantayya in Park City, Utah after the premiere of Coded Bias.