Biography
Deborah Raji is a Robotics Engineering student at the University of Toronto. After a year as a Machine Learning Engineering intern at Clarifai, a leading computer vision startup, she later became involved in AI research, working closely with Joy Buolamwini of the MIT Media Lab on several projects to highlight cases of bias in computer vision. Her first-author work with Joy has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Verge, Venture Beats, National Post, EnGadget, Toronto Star and won the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM/AAAI Conference for AI Ethics & Society. Her enthusiasm for coding also led her to found the student initiative, Project Include, which aims to provide summer coding bootcamps for hundreds of middle school students in low income communities in the Greater Toronto Area and Ecuador. She has presented multiple times on the topic of Machine Bias, at events run by Fast Company’s Innovation summit, Women Who Code NYC, Girls Make Apps, and AI4All and is now a mentee in Google AI’s flagship research mentorship cohort, working with their Ethical AI team.