Mount Holyoke's Computer Science department welcomes filmmaker, Shalini Kantayya to a very special discussion about her film, Coded Bias. This is being hosted as a cross-disciplinary event for the 5th annual Building On Our Momentum (BOOM!): Community Day Learning Conference. All students, alumnae, faculty and staff can register to view the film from March 17–23.

In addition to Coded Bias, Shalini Kantayya directed the season finale episode for the National Geographic television series Breakthrough, a series profiling trailblazing scientists transforming the future, Executive Produced by Ron Howard, and broadcast globally in June 2017. Her debut feature film Catching the Sun, about the race for a clean energy future, premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and was named a New York Times Critics’ Pick. Catching the Sun released globally on Netflix on Earth Day 2016 with Executive Producer Leonardo DiCaprio, and was nominated for the Environmental Media Association Award for Best Documentary.

Coded Bias film description:

In an increasingly data-driven, automated world, the question of how to protect individuals’ civil liberties in the face of artificial intelligence looms larger by the day. Coded Bias follows M.I.T. Media Lab computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, along with data scientists, mathematicians, and watchdog groups from all over the world, as they fight to expose the discrimination within facial recognition algorithms now prevalent across all spheres of daily life.

While conducting research on facial recognition technology at the M.I.T. Media Lab, Buolamwini, a "poet of code," made the startling discovery that the algorithm could not detect dark-skinned faces or women with accuracy. This led to the harrowing realization that the very machine-learning algorithms intended to avoid prejudice are only as unbiased as the humans and historical data programming them.

Coded Bias documents the dramatic journey that follows, from discovery to exposure to activism, as Buolamwini goes public with her findings and undertakes an effort to create a movement toward accountability and transparency, including testifying before Congress to push for the first-ever legislation governing facial recognition in the United States. The film also includes data journalist Meredith Broussard; Silkie Carlo, director of Big Brother Watch, who is monitoring the trial use of facial recognition technology by U.K. police; Virginia Eubanks, author of Automating Inequality; Ravi Naik, human rights lawyer and media commentator; Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, author and expert on algorithmic discrimination and technology bias; and Zeynep Tufekci, author of Twitter and Teargas.

Register to watch the film.