Last week Google announced a new dermatology app the doesn’t work on darker skinned people. A few days earlier, 60 Minutes did a piece on facial recognition technology used in policing and how it has led to wrongful arrests of Black and Brown people. However, the reporting completely erased the contributions of three Black women who pioneered this work – Joy Buolamwini, Deborah Raji and Timnit Gebru. Here in Canada, an 81 year old Black man, a retired BC Supreme Court Justice

In February 2019, I gathered in a jam packed hotel ballroom in downtown Edmonton to hear Dr. Safiya Noble talk about her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. This was early days for me in my study of AI ethics and learning about how discrimination can be baked into the technological tools we use. I was as shocked and disturbed as the hundreds of other people in the room as we listened to Dr. Noble's stories about conducting research on Google, u

I'm in NYC for the AI, Ethics and Society conference. Tonight, our opening keynote speaker was Charlton McIlwain who recently published a new book - Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice from the Afronet to Black Lives Matter. There are many reasons why Professor McIlwain wrote this book, as he outlines in this Slate article. In part, he was inspired by the story of Roy Wilkins, a civil rights activist, who wrote a particularly prescient opinion piece for the LA Tim