Joy Buolamwini
Birth: 1989
Death: Still Alive
Academics:
She received her education at MIT, Georgia Tech, and Oxford University. She gave a TED Talk on algorithmic bias. She wrote op-eds for the New York Times. She received a $50,000 grant as the Grand Prize Winner of a national contest inspired by the movie Hidden Figures.
Contributions to CS:
She began her journey when she created a mirror at MIT that could use software to track her face and overlay an image of one of her heroes. However, it did not work on her black skin because of the bias in facial recognition systems from large companies who mainly used white men's faces to train AI systems. Joy Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League where researchers and activists work together to ensure justice in the AI industry. She recognizes herself as a "poet of code" who shines light on algorithmic justice and racial/gender biases in AI services from large companies.
John McCarthy
Birth: September 4, 1927
Death: October 23, 2011
Academics:
He received a BS in mathematics from California Institute of Technology and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University. In 1965 he became the founding director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1971 he won the ACM Turing Award, the Kyoto Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Science in 1990, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2003.
Contributions to CS:
McCarthy co-founded the fields of Artificial Intelligence and timesharing systems, a method of distributing computer resources. He invented the programming language lisp for symbolic computation in 1958 at Stanford University. I found it interesting that John McCarthy was the one who coined the term " Artificial Intelligence".
Gladys West
Birth: October 28,1930
Death: June 6, 2021
Academics:
While attending Virginia State University, Gladys West recieved a BS and MS in mathematics. Later on, she recieved an MA in public administration at the University of Oklahoma. She furthered her education even more by earning a PhD at Virginia Tech in public administration.
Contributions to CS:
West developed an amazing program that could accurately calculate satellite orbits while including aspects of Earth like gravity, it is called GEOSAT. GEOSAT could accurately create complex models of the earth's surface with its data. It is used in our Global Positioning System (GPS).
